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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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