A frustrating read that promises more than it delivers.
In this study of Swedish crime-writing sensation Stieg Larsson (1954–2004), journalist Pettersson, who published Larsson’s first book in 2001 (not part of the Millenium Trilogy) opens with the claim that it is “not a biography in the conventional sense.”
Rather, it is a work that explores the writer's “public persona” in tandem with “the interplay between [Larsson’s] life and work and society at large.” True to his word, Petterson is restrained regarding the details about Larsson’s background, motivations and personal relationships. He begins with a cursory sketch of the writer’s beginnings in northern Sweden: his rural upbringing, his move to the largest city in the northern provinces and his early attraction to writing and left-wing political causes. From this point, Larsson’s work against the political predations of the Swedish extreme right rooted in neo-Nazi fascism and committed to “ethnic homogeneity and Western values” take center stage. His political activism and journalistic inclinations led him to Stockholm, where he worked as a news graphic illustrator and eventually founded Expo, a magazine dedicated to monitoring and exposing the activities of those affiliated with the extreme right. The story of the future crime-fiction novelist’s fight against neo-Nazism is intriguing, but Pettersson’s treatment of this aspect of the story is inept. In his efforts to explain the history and evolution of the Swedish right, Pettersson often loses the narrative thread about Larsson. Furthermore, he never accomplishes more than suggesting the obvious: that Larsson’s bestselling Millennium Trilogy was born of encounters with ideologies that openly espoused hatred of “the weak, the deviant, the foreign [and] the different.”
A frustrating read that promises more than it delivers.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4027-8940-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Sterling
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2011
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
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
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