A sweet but not saccharine recollection of a happy Victorian childhood in England, replete with stern nannies, sausage breakfasts, loving parents, and indulgent grandparents. Appearing in the US for the first time, this 1931 volume is one of a series of Thirkell's works, including more than 30 novels that are being reissued here. In this memoir Thirkell recalls the time and places in which she spent her turn-of-the- century childhood. She was the granddaughter of painter Edward Burne-Jones, one of the inner circle of pre-Raphaelite artists and poets that included Gabriel Rossetti and designer William Morris. The three houses are those of her parents in London's Kensington section, of her grandparents in what is now West Kensington, plus a seaside home where the family spent its summers. From the nursery window of her parents' home—next door to an historic pub—Thirkell could watch the panorama on Kensington Square, including a parade of colorful street performers. Sometimes the family would visit neighbors, among them the actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell, ``Aunt Stella'' to Thirkell. On winter Sundays, Thirkell's family would lunch with her grandparents in a house that once belonged to 18th-century novelist Samuel Richardson. Visitors came and went, among them Princess Alexandra, while the children played in the orchard or occasionally slipped into their grandfather's forbidden studio, where a manikin with a papier-mÉchÇ head titillated them. Most beloved was the house at the sea. Full of nooks and crannies where the children created great adventures, it was just across from the home where cousin Rudyard Kipling's family was ensconced. Offering memories of a childhood as romantic and rich as her grandfather's paintings, Thirkell leavens the lushness with some tart observations about the arbitrary strictures of Victorian life. Tales of a domestic happiness—a refreshing foil to the current wave of tales of abusive and narcissistic families.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1998
ISBN: 1-55921-215-2
Page Count: 134
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1997
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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