These five years' worth of Stevenson's letters fill up another two volumes of an intense and concentrated correspondence reflecting a short life. The period from 1879 to 1884 covers Stevenson's (The Collected Letters, Vols. I & II, p. 619) first literary successes (Treasure Island and A Child's Garden of Verses), the early phase of his marriage to American Fanny Osbourne, and the start of his lifelong search for better health. His correspondents during this time include Victorian literary lions Edmund Gosse, W.E. Henley, and J.A. Symonds, not to mention his new wife, his bohemian cousin Bob, and his anxious parents. Less useful for direct biographical or critical information than as a partial reflection of his personal life, Stevenson's letters are carefully modulated to each recipient's mood and character. To his friends, he dispensed jokes about his shaky health and nascent writing career, about which in turn he would have to reassure his parents in calm reports; and while his friends tried to accustom themselves to his new American wife, he and Fanny wrote joint letters to his parents to introduce them to her. His preferred epistolary embellishments in these volumes are doggerel verse (particularly about his parodic man of letters, C.G. Brash), passages in broad Scots, and fantastic handwriting and doodles. His subjects are always more prosaic than what's portrayed in his books (even his rasher ventures in California come across as less interesting than he made them in The Amateur Emigrant, Travels with a Donkey, and Silverado Squatters). By the fourth volume, between his search for essay material and exchanges with Henley over the editorial value of the latter's magazine, Stevenson gradually began to sharpen the aesthetic opinions that would inform his friendship with Henry James and his later work. (For a biography of Stevenson in this issue, see p. 1339.) Consistently entertaining, whether from a transcontinental railway car, a sickbed in France, or an overcrowded writing desk.
Pub Date: Nov. 16, 1994
ISBN: 0-300-06187-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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
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