A thorough if somewhat detached life of the dean of Western American letters. Best remembered as an environmentalist and historian, Stegner (19091993) was also an accomplished novelist who, Benson points out, had won ``nearly every major award given to a writer except the Nobel Prize'' but whose works generally sold only modestly. Benson (The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, 1983) charts the course of Stegner's development as a writer. He has little to say about his subject's early years except that they were marked by ``emotional isolation and feelings of deficiency and failure,'' but he warms up when dealing with the adult Stegner, armed with a doctorate and occupying influential positions at Harvard and, later, Stanford, where he founded the fellowships in creative writing that bear his name. (Among his students were Ken Kesey, Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry, and Robert Stone.) Stegner documented his own life so well, in books like the semiautobiographical novel The Big Rock Candy Mountain and Wolf Willow, a blend of history and memoir, that Benson can sometimes add little to the portrait Stegner left us. But Benson, himself a professor of literature (San Diego State Univ.), has much to say about the content of Stegner's books and the manner of their composition. Benson stresses Stegner's preoccupation in his books with the development of personal identity, as well as his unusual, tightly woven narrative structures. There are also a few thought-provoking surprises, as when Benson points out that at the end of his life Stegner was so depressed about the rape of the West that he intended to move to Vermont, where, he maintained, there was more wild nature than in California. Admirers of Stegner's work will find this a useful but uninspired companion. (photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-670-86222-3
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1996
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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