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From one of your most perceptive and provocative voices comes a deeply researched accounts of the previous days and nights of Susan Sontag, Sigmund Freud, John Updike, Dylan Thomas, Maurice Sendak, and James Salter - an arresting and wholly original meditation on mortality. In The Violet Hour, Katie Roiphe needs an urgent and liberating method of the most unavoidable of subjects. She investigates the previous days and nights of six great thinkers, writers, and music artists as they come to conditions with the truth of approaching fatality, or what T. S. Eliot called "the night hour that strives Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea". Roiphe draws on her own outstanding research and usage of the family, friends, and caretakers of her subjects. Here is Susan Sontag, the consummate general public intellectual, who finds her determination to rational thinking examined during her third bout with cancer. Roiphe needs us to a healthcare facility room where, after receiving the most severe possible identification, 76-year-old John Updike begins writing a poem. She vividly re-creates the fortnight of almost suicidal surplus that culminated in Dylan Thomas' fatal collapse at the Chelsea Hotel. She offers us a bracing portrait of Sigmund Freud fleeing Nazi-occupied Vienna and then continue in his London exile the compulsive cigar smoking that he knows will hasten his drop. And she shows us how Maurice Sendak's loved books for children are infused with his lifelong obsession with fatality, if you know where to look. The Violet Hour is a publication filled with romantic and unexpected revelations. In the final acts of every of the creative geniuses are types of courage, passion, self-delusion, pointless anguish, and superb devotion. There are also occasions of sublime understanding and understanding where the mind creates its comfort. As the author writes, "If it's nearly impossible to capture the approach of fatality in words, who have the most hope to do it?" By delivering these great writers' final days and nights to urgent, unsentimental life, Katie Roiphe helps us to look boldly in the face of death and become less afraid.
