This volume will mainly interest those who have already read everything else by and about the author of The Great Gatsby.
The title suggests something more significant than this collection of magazine essays delivers.
While the preface promises that this is “as close as we can now come to an autobiography” of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940), most of these pieces for the likes of the Saturday Evening Post, Ladies’ Home Journal, College Humor et al. are breezy and slight, lacking the scope, depth and detail of autobiography—you’d never know from this volume that he’d wed a woman named Zelda or the nature of the troubles that ensued—let alone the richness of his fiction. Frequently strapped for cash, Fitzgerald had apparently proposed such a volume on at least a couple of occasions to his legendary editor Maxwell Perkins, who didn’t think it to be worthy of a book. In fact, the title comes from one of the shorter pieces, a New Yorker casual from 1929 that traces a life through a progression of drink (“1923: Oceans of Canadian Ale with R. Lardner in Great Neck, Long Island”). Yet Fitzgerald fans will delight in the book’s engagingly playful tone (which has the author switching from first to third person in referring to himself), the struggles of the creative process (“It would be nice to be able to distinguish useful work from mere labor expended. Perhaps that is part of the work itself—to find the difference”) and the sense of literary mission in speaking to and for one’s own generation. In the cheeky “What I Think and Feel at 25,” Fitzgerald writes, “As old people run the world, an enormous camouflage has been built up to hide the fact that only young people are attractive or important.” But, as the same essay acknowledges, “When I’m thirty I won’t be this me—I’ll be somebody else.”
This volume will mainly interest those who have already read everything else by and about the author of The Great Gatsby.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4391-9906-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2011
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
