Readable, if incomplete, account of a national treasure.
A friend and noted scholar of the graciously skilled Southern author fashions a beaming, hefty salute to her long, fruitful life.
Marrs (English/Millsaps Coll.) takes issue with Ann Waldron’s unauthorized biography (Eudora, 1998), which depicted the author as a “charming and successful ugly duckling,” and with Claudia Roth Pierpont’s equally reductive New Yorker portrait of “a perfect lady—a nearly Petrified Woman.” This weightily detailed volume emphasizes Welty’s restless vitality and openness to new experience. The author does not deal in psychoanalytical fine points. In her account, Welty (1909–2001) had a happy childhood in Jackson, Miss., sheltered by adoring parents with whom she would live well into her adult years, but broadened by travel, especially to New York City. Moving from photography, her first love, to fiction, Welty encountered success fairly early and by 1936 saw the publication of her first story, “Death of a Traveling Salesman,” along with an exhibition of her photographs at a New York gallery. She gradually built up a repertory of exquisitely crafted stories, published as A Curtain of Green in 1941, and garnered a close working relationship with the literary names that would mentor and sponsor her, such as Katherine Anne Porter, Robert Penn Warren, William Maxwell and loyal agent Diarmuid Russell. Welty overcame the crushing disappointment of never marrying her hometown beau, John Robinson, whose inferior literary talent and conflicted sexuality drove him from her by middle age. Gracious to younger talent, she was instrumental in promoting the work of others, such as Reynolds Price. Marrs tenderly asserts that Welty enjoyed an independent life characterized by “the presence of melancholy intertwined with joy.” However, her reluctance to make autobiographical suppositions about her subject’s work leaves this volume faintly dry and ethereal.
Readable, if incomplete, account of a national treasure.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-15-100914-7
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2005
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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