A feast for the Mark Twain fans, and a fitting commemoration of this, his 100th anniversary year. Read it for the many-faceted portrait of the man in all his roles that emerges from the lovingly prepared text. Meltzer has skillfully woven together a running commentary, chronological in essence, into which he has inserted extracts from a generous variety of Mark Twain's own writings. The result is virtually a biography- done in a different way - as it treats of his boyhood, his early apprenticeship as a printer, his introduction to river life as a child- and his education as a pilot. You learn about his homes, his schools and teachers and schoolmates; you meet the originals of Tom Sawyer, of Huckleberry Finn, of Becky Thatcher, of Aunt Polly (his mother); you visit with him and his cousins at his uncle's farm; you learn of the activities and entertainment in a Missouri small town. Sam Clemens had an itching heel- and his travelling began early and took him from coast to coast and often to Europe. He wrote to finance his trips- and various of his travel letters and journalistic pieces have found immortality between book covers. Roughing It, Life on the Mississippi, Innocents Abroad- all grew out of his passion for going places and seeing things- and people. His marriage stabilized all this- to some extent- and a happy marriage and family life it was, despite many sorrows and losses that came to him, his only son, usy, Livy (his wife) and finally Jean. His career as a writer, as a lecturer, encompassed the major years of his life- and all this is followed in this abundant text. And then there are the pictures:- daguerreotypes, tintypes, sketches (some of his own), photographs, old prints, cartoons, reprints of broadsides, posters, news notes, clippings, letters — much of the material never before used and totalling an incredible 500 and more. A bonanza!
Pub Date: June 15, 1960
ISBN: 0826214126
Page Count: 322
Publisher: T.Y. Crowell
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
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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