An absorbing biography of the beloved poet, philosopher, artist, and author of The Prophet. Waterfield has previously published an anthology of Gibran’s work, The Voice of Kahlil Gibran, and sets out here to correct the hagiographic portrait of Gibran (1883—1931) often painted by his followers. True, Waterfield asserts, Gibran was a genius, but he was also a complex man haunted by insecurities. Waterfield’s task is arduous in part because Gibran left a legacy of romanticized pasts for himself; at various times he claimed that he had been raised in a palace, had published romantic ballads in Syria and Egypt before emigrating at the age of 12, and had met the kaiser as a child. The reality was more a typical Ellis Island hardscrabble story, with Gibran, his mother, and his siblings escaping the poverty and patriarchy of their Lebanese background by coming to America. America was almost as cruel: Gibran’s mother and two of his three siblings died of terminal illnesses within a year of one another. Gibran sought refuge from his family’s hardships by drawing the portraits of the elite in Boston society, gradually playing upon their Oriental romanticism to be accepted (and financially supported) by them. After a classical Arabic college education back in Beirut, Gibran returned to America to make a name for himself in art and literature. He studied art in Paris, courtesy of an older benefactress to whom he was once engaged, then sampled the bohemian life of Greenwich Village. Waterfield ventures further than any of Gibran’s previous chroniclers by including the details of the artist’s often callous sexual dalliances and his alcoholism, which caused his early death from cirrhosis. Waterfield’s agenda here is not merely to expose the artist’s feet of clay, but to show him as a man, as capable of narcissism as spiritual depth, as gifted at ruthlessly using others as at charming them. The result is critical but well researched and cogently argued.
Pub Date: Nov. 30, 1998
ISBN: 0-312-19319-X
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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