Can a minor literary figure sustain interest throughout a major biography? In the case of Henry James Sr., the answer is yes. James is the ``blocked and monomaniacal hierophant'' who fathered perhaps America's most remarkable literary brood—Henry, William, and Alice. With equal parts psychological insight and mordant humor, Habegger (English/Univ. of Kansas; Henry James and the ``Woman Business,'' not reviewed) limns a fiercely paradoxical man constantly undermined by inner demons. Henry Sr. (181182) is little read today, but he was an intellectual when it first came to matter during the American Literary Renaissance. An eccentric philosopher, Henry Sr. had wealth and a gift for witty conversation that gave him access to many of the leading literary and intellectual men of his day, including Emerson, Carlyle, Thoreau, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, yet his bilious essays also mired him in endless controversy. Habegger traces much of his character to a childhood accident that deprived him of a leg and gave him, presumably, much to compensate for. He spent his youth in drunken idleness. He had a devastating nervous breakdown in his 30s and later embraced and then quarreled with one religion or philosophy after another, including Calvinism, Swedenborgism, and Fourierism (his advocacy of the latter's theories on sexual freedom caused a huge scandal). His family relations also bore the marks of the crackpot: He favored William, shuttled Henry Jr. from one school and instructor to another, left his two younger sons exposed to the Civil War service from which William and Henry were shielded, and, regarding women as a mere appendage to men, so smothered Alice's questing intellect that she became suicidal. How ironic that in middle age this egotist came to believe that selfhood was the principle root of evil. This deserves an honored place on the shelves with previous biographies of the James family by Leon Edel, R.W.B. Lewis, and Jean Strouse.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-374-15383-3
Page Count: 550
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
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
PERSPECTIVES
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