A sprawling, addictive addition to a seemingly bottomless category that this month also includes the New York Times...
Fat, juicy plums from the Washington Post Book World’s long-running “Writing Life” column.
Book World editor Arana launched her column in 1993 (Stanley Elkin was the first contributor) in the format it retains today: a few paragraphs of biography preceding an essay by the writer of the week on the practice of his or her craft. This collection, loosely organized around such themes as “On Becoming a Writer,” “Raw Material,” and “Hunkering Down,” meanders through everything from practical advice to thoughts of childhood to vague but entertaining musings on a career. We begin with Francine du Plessix Gray's four central principles of writing, Joyce Carol Oates's pointed recollection of bullying and gender roles in childhood, and James Michener's advice on “how to identify and nurture young writers.” Alice McDermott, Scott Turow, John Edgar Wideman, Anita Desai, and Julia Alvarez, et al., discuss the roots of their writing. Wendy Wasserstein gives specific instructions on how to get a hotel room and write for a New Year's deadline. Ray Bradbury recalls his long relationship with the movies. Though there is plenty of discussion of the writer's “self-doubt and wry paranoia,” as Julian Barnes puts it in an intriguing piece about being literary executor of Dodie Smith's estate, most of the authors more or less comfortably accept that this is, in fact, the career that defines their lives. Challenges are myriad, of course: Michael Chabon fears that readers will too closely identify him with his protagonists (a homosexual, a frustrated author, a bad father), and according to Jimmy Carter, co-authoring Everything to Gain with wife Rosalynn almost broke up their 40-year marriage.
A sprawling, addictive addition to a seemingly bottomless category that this month also includes the New York Times anthology Writers on Writing (see below).Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-58648-149-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2003
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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