Graceful, psychologically astute portrait of the enigmatic author/scholar/explorer who was one of the first Christians to enter Mecca, discovered Africa's Lake Tanganyika, and translated such masterpieces as the Kama Sutra and The Arabian Nights. Published in England last year to commemorate the centenary of Burton's death, this biography marks a decided advance over McLynn's plodding Stanley (1990). While McLynn organizes the known facts of Burton's life with admirable economy and clarity, it is when he speculates on his subject's quirky—and frequently self-defeating, proto-fascist, and woman-hating—reactions to his milieux that he achieves some of his most telling effects. For example, McLynn discusses Burton's repressed homosexuality and persuasively argues that, as a young officer in India, Burton actually took part in the sexual activities he described in his report on male brothels in Karachi. Equally convincing is McLynn's theory that Burton's lifelong misogyny stemmed from his failure as a heterosexual lover during his army career. Among other well-rounded portraits here are those of John Hanning Speke, Burton's fellow explorer who was eventually designated the discoverer of the sources of the Nile, and of Isabel Arundell, the neurotic woman whom Burton married and who destroyed many of his most important documents after his death. The Arundell portrait very nearly walks off with the book, in fact, as McLynn captures the conflicting facets of her character—fawning wife, relentless promoter of her husband's reputation, religious zealot, social snob—in highly evocative detail. Excepting McLynn's fondness for arcane words and foreign phrases (``foetor,'' ``feculent,'' and ``canaille'' all appear in a single sentence)—a compelling and satisfying depiction of a man and an era, a worthy companion to Edward Rice's best-selling Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton (1990). (Eight pages of b&w illustrations, four maps.)
Pub Date: July 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-7195-4818-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: John Murray Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1991
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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