A useful book for any young writer, and a must for fans, this is unmistakably King: friendly, sharply perceptive, cheerfully...
Generous, lucid, and passionate, King (Hearts in Atlantis, 1999, etc.) offers lessons and encouragement to the beginning writer, along with a warts-and-all account of a less-than-carefree life.
The composition of this memoir, King’s first nonfiction work since Danse Macabre, was interrupted when he was almost killed by a drunk driver in 1999. The first portion of it shares the making of the writer: his impoverished but experientially rich childhood, his first efforts and influences, the threadbare existence he and his wife Tabitha lived until the publication of Carrie, and his remarkable success thereafter. There are some delightful anecdotes here. In a late-night creative frenzy, his wife sleeping in their London hotel room, King asks the concierge for a place to write and is led to Rudyard Kipling's desk. Though intimidated, King proceeds to write the beginnings of Misery, then thanks the concierge, who tells him, “Kipling died there actually. . . . While writing.” King discusses his problems with drugs and alcohol and offers an assessment of his own work (he doesn’t think much of Insomnia or Rose Madder, but he liked Cujo and regrets that he was too drunk at the time to remember writing any of it). Written largely while recovering from his accident, the rest of the memoir answers the questions King hears from aspiring writers, as well as the questions they should be asking, but don't. With examples that reach from T.S. Eliot to pulp fiction, there's much trenchant material here on how to construct a story, how to revise, and how to go about building a career. King stresses character and situation over plotting, and insists on basics—like Strunk and White and, above all, endless reading and writing. While his proposed output might intimidate some, his enthusiasm wins out.
A useful book for any young writer, and a must for fans, this is unmistakably King: friendly, sharply perceptive, cheerfully vulgar, sometimes adolescent in his humor, sometimes impatient with fools, but always sincere in his love of language and writing.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-85352-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2000
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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