Though Bair can at times seem like a referee deciding which version of Nin's life is most accurate, this exhaustive account of the former feminist icon is impressive. The challenge of writing about Nin is the wealth of often disparate sources. Nin's published diaries, her fiction, and her ``unexpurgated'' diaries combine to give conflicting accounts of this bigamous woman whose most famous love affair was with Henry Miller. Bair (Simone de Beauvoir, 1990, etc.) gained access to the originals of the diaries (the unexpurgated versions were, in fact, heavily edited), Nin's voluminous correspondence, and many intimate friends, lovers, and spouses. The resulting biography is a fine one that traces Nin from her beginnings in Cuba, through her move to New York as a teenager; her life in Paris; her shuttling between New York, Mexico, and California; her literary career, which did little but sputter until the publication of her edited diaries in the 1970s, to her death from cancer in 1977. The engine that drove Nin and drives this story are her affairs, which began with her tumultuous relationship with Henry and June Miller. Bair describes the endless line of lovers, including Gore Vidal (they never consummated the relationship), other women, and her own father. Throughout, Hugh Parker Guiler, the husband she married while still young, remains with her, staying out of the way of her extramarital life to the extent that she was able to have a second husband on an opposite coast for over a decade. Along with the steady stream of peccadilloes, Bair offers just enough small details, such as the movies Nin went to see, to personalize the narrative. The only fault of the book is that Bair at times goes on too long in presenting all sides of debates over which version of various events is most true. Bair's Nin emerges as the complex woman she was, a woman who inspired both wrath and passion in those whose paths crossed hers.
Pub Date: March 8, 1995
ISBN: 0-399-13988-5
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1994
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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