The reader must decide whether this eloquent self-portrait does express regret, even atonement; represents yet another...
The 1999 Nobel Prize–winner tells the story of his childhood, youth and early artistic career in a riveting memoir that has quickly attracted international controversy and not a little righteous anger.
For, the world now knows, the brilliant expressionist author—a painter and sculptor in words as in the visual and plastic arts he has likewise mastered—long known as a fierce critic of German xenophobia and in particular his country’s 20th-century history of aggression and genocide, kept silent for decades about his own experiences as a soldier of the Third Reich. In an essentially chronological narrative that frequently looks forward to Grass’s later years (he’s now in his 80s), we learn of his youth as the dreamy, artistically inclined son of a “bourgeois” shopkeeper’s family, as well as the apolitical “faith in the Führer” that inspired him to don a smart-looking uniform that might attract girls and to join Heinrich Himmler’s Waffen-S.S. (after attempting to enter the submarine service). We also receive information about his combat misadventures and borderline-arduous detainment in POW camps. Employing both first- and third-person narration, Grass pictures himself as an idealistic naïf who slowly developed a mature political conscience, as he emerged from the war unharmed, worked in a potash mine, then apprenticed to first a stone-cutter then a sculptor, traveled and absorbed culture (e.g., participating in a jam session joined by a visiting Louis Armstrong), married and fathered four children and earned fame with the publication of his first novel, The Tin Drum, in 1959. The command of incident and detail is superlative, and the book is immensely readable. But some will feel that Grass’s apologia, if it is such, amounts to too little too late. “I practiced the art of evasion,” he concedes, “[but] the massive weight of the German past and hence my own …. stood in my way …. No path led round it.”
The reader must decide whether this eloquent self-portrait does express regret, even atonement; represents yet another “evasion”; or, how much, in the final analysis, the difference actually matters.Pub Date: June 25, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-15-101477-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2007
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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
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