The fourth volume of Merton's correspondence, complementing The Hidden Ground of Love, 1985 (letters on religion and society), The Road to Joy, 1989 (letters to friends), and The School of Charity, 1990 (letters on monastic spirituality). It's now apparent that Merton, already celebrated as an autobiographer and Christian contemplative, was also one of the great American letter-writers of the century. His range is as vast as his adopted nation (he was born in France): God, jazz, civil rights, atomic weaponry, obedience, rebellion, etc. Ably edited by Bochen (Religious Studies/Nazareth College of Rochester), this collection consists of letters to other writers; the contents all postdate Merton's bestselling literary debut, The Seven Storey Mountain (1948). The first epistles, in fact, are addressed to Evelyn Waugh, who was assigned the task of trimming Mountain for British publication. Here, Merton is the eager apprentice at the mentor's feet (``I need criticism the way a man dying of thirst needs water''), but not above passing on clever ideas for novels or urging Waugh to recite the rosary. Next comes a compilation of letters to three Christian writers: Jacques Maritain, with whom Merton discusses the joys of the hermit life; Czeslaw Milosz, who questions the value of political action; and Boris Pasternak, to whom Merton reveals some dreams. A flurry of letters to Latin American writers, most of them obscure—Ernesto Cardenal, once a novice monk under Merton's guidance, is a notable exception— invites glossing-over. The great grab bag comes last: missives to American correspondents like James Baldwin, Walker Percy, William Carlos Williams, and Henry Miller (the two balding guys chuckle over their physical likeness). Less jocular than The Road to Joy, less profound than The School of Charity—but, for all that, a well-rounded monument to a well-rounded man.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-374-13055-8
Page Count: 385
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
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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