Strictly for fans who won’t mind this often-terrific storyteller not coming to a satisfactory conclusion, but rather...
Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist McMurtry follows the first volume of his memoirs, Books (2008), with a desultory account of his journey through “the scrappy, variegated world of letters.”
For the author, becoming a professional writer began with a Rice University creative-writing class—“it was bound to be better than sitting in math class, watching the calculus sail over my head”—but did not take off until his transfer to North Texas State Teachers College. Though more or less chronologically arranged, the rest of the narrative is surprisingly fitful and somewhat artless. McMurtry hints that Rhino Ranch (2009), the last of his novels devoted to Duane Moore of The Last Picture Show (1966), will be his farewell to fiction, and this narrative has its own autumnal feel to it: “In old age one writes, if at all, what one can.” Moving among the antiquarian book trade (his longtime sideline), literature and Hollywood (the subject of his next projected memoir), the slapdash organization might have been pardonable if not for a string of abortive vignettes. McMurtry piques interest, for instance, in observing that he once sat at dinner with DC hostess Pamela Harriman, “the greatest horizontale of her era,” but the author doesn’t provide the slightest detail beyond that statement. Many readers will wish he had spent more time on hellraisers James Dickey, Willie Morris and George Garrett; many of the other brief portraits—Wallace Stegner, Susan Sontag, Ken Kesey and Norman Mailer—read as if rendered with a dry eye. Thankfully, McMurtry isn’t too impressed with himself either. He points to an eight-year fallow period in which he disliked his prose following Terms of Endearment (1975). His brand of “old-fashioned realism,” he writes, has usually failed to impress critics—with the notable exception of Lonesome Dove (1985). Now, at the end of the trail, he prides himself on being a man of letters, neither rich nor poor, and sometimes reaching artistic heights in the bargain.
Strictly for fans who won’t mind this often-terrific storyteller not coming to a satisfactory conclusion, but rather ceasing, in exhaustion, from his prolific labors.Pub Date: Dec. 8, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4391-5993-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2009
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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