Splendid, poignant prose.
Former U.S. Poet Laureate Hall (White Apples and Taste of Stone, 2006, etc.) applies his magical way with language to a history of self.
To be published on his 80th birthday, this memoir roves among a lifetime of memories, many of them unearthed by unpacking a collection of boxes inherited after his mother’s death in 1994. Despite growing up in the shadow of the Great Depression, Hall arrived early in his teens at the decision to pursue the unremunerative profession of poetry. An early anecdote, as endearing as it is audacious, describes Hall boldly refusing “with sixteen-year-old hauteur” an opportunity to audit the prestigious Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference as an unpaid waiter, insisting on his right to attend as a contributing poet. Accepted on those terms, he met Robert Frost, Richard Wright and a young woman who contributed a memorable rite of passage on V-J Day. Poe, Keats and Shelley impressed upon the adolescent Hall a notion of accomplishment and experiment in style; later on, Eliot and Pound inspired him, as did late-1940s Harvard, where “no one spoke with scorn, no one made a gagging sound, no one mimed effeminacy” when the word poetry was uttered. In 1951, he moved on to Oxford, where he established a foothold in the emerging literary elite. Throughout his text, the poet draws back to those boxes from his mother’s house, filled not just with a career in retrospect but also valuable glimpses of the emerging writer in unpublished stories and poems. Hall writes with voluptuous recall, listing childhood dates and names with alacrity, providing adult reflections on his parents’ lives and his own adventures in love and fatherhood. The most heartbreaking chapters are dedicated to his late wife, poet Jane Kenyon, with whom he spent 25 years ensconced in his maternal grandparents’ New Hampshire farm. From his life and the tragedy of her loss, Hall has produced a waterfall of poems in works such as The Happy Man and Without; this touching memoir will make you want to read them all.
Splendid, poignant prose.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-618-99065-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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