A memoir of easy grace and lively intelligence, filled with striking portraits of individuals, a time, and a place.
Perceptive, engaging memoirs of a woman’s life shaped around the absence of certain men.
For novelist and memoirist Johnson (Minor Characters, 1983, etc.), the first man whose departure affected her life was her cultured grandfather, whose early suicide left his daughter with unrealized artistic longings. A stereotypical stage mother living through her child, she pushed Joyce to become an actress/dancer/composer. From her highly managed childhood, the author skips ahead to the early 1960s, when she was 26. (Presumably because Minor Characters covered Johnson’s romance with Jack Kerouac, those years are barely mentioned.) She had already lived with and been left by one painter, and was about to take up with another, James Johnson. Missing men figured in his life, too: he was a fatherless man who had left his own sons behind when he separated from their mother. The sad tale of James and Joyce’s love affair and brief marriage, which provided the basis for her novel In the Night Café (1989), is set in the lofts and bars of Greenwich Village, where money was scarce, art was abstract, and drinking was heavy. Within a year of his accidental death in 1963, she met and fell for another fatherless Abstract Expressionist, Peter Pinchbeck. Definitely not a family man, Pinchbeck married Johnson only after she became pregnant, assured by her that having a baby around would not change his life as an artist. In understated style she recounts her attempts to keep that promise by supporting herself, her son, and a husband whose paintings did not sell. After five years she left Pinchbeck, began reading feminist writers, found that living alone suited her, and discovered that she could write. Living apart but still married until he died in 2000, they were more than friends but less than lovers, linked by a son and a past but separated by unbridgeable differences.
A memoir of easy grace and lively intelligence, filled with striking portraits of individuals, a time, and a place.Pub Date: May 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-670-03310-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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