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FANNY STEVENSON

A ROMANCE OF DESTINY

Sprawling over the boundary between biography and fiction, a tale of the passionate adventures of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson (18411918). There was little in Fanny Stevenson's Indiana farm background that would predict her courageous flight from Victorian convention, unless it was her father's Universalist religion or his determination to teach his daughters to be independent-minded. After following her first husband to the mining districts of Nevada and then to San Francisco, she left him to study painting in France, where she met Robert Louis Stevenson. Ever determined to be in the forefront of artistic trends, Fanny returned to California and settled in Monterey, where Stevenson joined her. She divorced her unfaithful, alcoholic husband in the teeth of opposition from even her most liberal relatives and married Stevenson. They then set out on their well-documented wanderings in the south of France, New York, Hawaii, and the South Seas. Lapierre (daughter of Dominique Lapierre) focuses almost entirely on Fanny and her family, rescuing her from the condescension and even hatred of Robert Louis Stevenson's friends, admirers, and biographers. But is this rightly called a biography? In a preliminary ``warning to the reader,'' Lapierre asserts that the facts conveyed here are strictly true, but concedes that she has often taken the best parts of several letters and reconstructed a better one for her biography. Furthermore, she frequently composes hypothetical conversations in order to make a good story or to illustrate the states of mind of Fanny and those around her. Yet Lapierre reassures the reader, not only with recurrent warnings in the text about gaps in her knowledge, but with intelligent commentary and attention to telling detail. Having energetically retraced Fanny Stevenson's steps, she uses her own knowledge of Nevada, Panama, and Samoa to give the reader a sense of immediacy and place. Published in a smooth and unobtrusive translation from the French, this book is difficult to put down.

Pub Date: April 1, 1995

ISBN: 0-7867-0127-7

Page Count: 520

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1995

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INTO THE WILD

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990). 

Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996

ISBN: 0-679-42850-X

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Villard

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995

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WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...

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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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