Not by any means a new Doyle, but a familiar one supported by a wealth of new detail.
The life of Arthur Conan Doyle from the first biographer to be granted access to the Doyle archives.
The leading problem in writing about the creator of Sherlock Holmes is that Doyle always considered the detective stories that brought him fame and fortune inferior to his other writing, especially the historical novels and military histories by which he hoped to be remembered. Lycett (Dylan Thomas: A New Life, 2004, etc.) may not find a compelling balance between what Doyle thought was important about his life and work and what most readers will think important, but he does an excellent job rooting the Holmes stories in the financial and legal realities of their author’s life. A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four were among many projects the Edinburgh-trained physician planned to start his literary career. The first two series of Holmes short stories were written to order for a particular market; and after killing his tiresomely superior hero off in 1894, Doyle resurrected him only when it suited the requirements of a story he had already planned (The Hound of the Baskervilles) or as a means to some ready cash (the last three volumes of short stories). Lycett’s access to archival material sometimes threatens to overwhelm his portrait in minutiae, and his schematic portents (history, faith and family “were to battle for supremacy in Arthur’s personality”) are seldom persuasive. But his handling of newly available information on the uneasy triangle involving Doyle and his first and second wives; his checkered relationship with Harry Houdini, the debunker of spiritualism whom Doyle persistently and mistakenly claimed as an ally; and the tangled web of copyright lawsuits of film adaptations of Sherlock Holmes are all welcome.
Not by any means a new Doyle, but a familiar one supported by a wealth of new detail.Pub Date: Dec. 4, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-7432-7523-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
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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