Recounting triumph and tragedy, these letters help round out a portrait of a writer who had long ago reconciled himself to a...
A collection of correspondence to friends and family over more than half a century, recounting the noted British traveler and writer’s adventures over a long life.
If letters are a lost art, you wouldn’t know it from reading this lively collection by Fermor (1915-2011), who, writes editor Sisman (John le Carré: The Biography, 2015, etc.), saw them as “a means…of making convivial connection across the void.” Famously, as a young man, Fermor had walked across Europe to what is now Istanbul, witnessing the rise of Nazism as he crossed Germany. In the ensuing war, he served as a special operations officer who, spectacularly, kidnapped a German general in Greece. “The Germans in Crete,” he recalls understatedly of his squad of behind-the-lines mischief-makers, “were just as courageous, probably more efficient, four times more numerous and a hundred times more ruthless than the British…and yet we all managed to survive quite easily.” Fermor seems to have remembered everyone he met and every snippet of conversation that entered his ears, for his letters, to friends and fellow writers such as the poet George Seferis and the medieval historian John Julius Norwich, are full of details of all that he witnessed. Sometimes his memories, as presented in these letters, are quite striking: here he awakens in the middle of the night to the sound of wild ponies driven by the cold from the Devonshire moors, there he recalls decrepit Transylvanian hotels and rugged Spanish goat paths. Even his mundane reminiscences are interesting. He protests in old age that his “memory swings very erratically from the lucid to the nebulous and back,” but he doesn’t skip a beat. Fans of Fermor’s travelogues will recognize incidents, and readers new to him will find this a good introduction.
Recounting triumph and tragedy, these letters help round out a portrait of a writer who had long ago reconciled himself to a minor role in literary history—but who deserves a wide readership all the same.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-68137-156-6
Page Count: 496
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: July 24, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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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