An accomplished biography of one of the most important women of 18th- century Britain. Journalist Foreman, whose work is based on her doctoral research at Oxford, has written a lively account of the life and times of Georgiana Cavendish that is also a social history of the British aristocracy in the late 1700s. Born in 1757, Georgiana Spencer married William Cavendish, fifth Duke of Devonshire, a leading Whig aristocrat who never sought nor held high public office. What the taciturn duke lacked in political drive was more than made up for by his ambitious wife. The duchess made their London home, Devonshire House, the center of Whig politics and social life for the last quarter of the 18th century. Although the mores of the time limited any woman’s political role, Georgiana wielded considerable influence with Charles James Fox, Charles Grey, and other Whig politicians of the day. She was the first woman to publicly campaign for a candidate in an election, stumping for Fox in 1784. She was the intermediary in many a brokered deal (e.g., the multiparty coalition that turned out Addington’s government in 1804). The Devonshire House circle set trends in fashion, dance, and games of chance. Georgiana was considered the most captivating society woman of her time, but her life—already complicated by the presence of Lady Elizabeth Foster, her friend and her husband’s mistress, in her household—was darkened further by her addictive gambling, her indiscreet affair with Grey, and the resulting pregnancy. Brian Masters presented a more forgiving view of the mÇnage Ö trois in his Georgiana (1981). But Foreman’s Georgiana is shown in greater detail as a remarkable and intelligent woman whose literary and scientific pursuits were encouraged by the likes of Edward Gibbon. Effortlessly written and scrupulously documented, this will be the standard biography of Georgiana for some time. (16 pages illus., not seen)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-50294-7
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1999
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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