Luminous proof that history glows with emotion. (11 b&w illustrations)
Lanyon’s graceful, compelling account of her pursuit of the story of the son of Hernán Cortés and Malinche, an Amerindian woman who was the subject of the author’s Malinche’s Conquest (2000).
In this swift, lucid blend of history and memoir, Australian writer Lanyon tells of her hours in archives, her discoveries in Mexican and Spanish sites, her emotional journey back to the 16th century to unravel the complicated story of the eldest Cortés son. Compounding the author’s difficulties was Hernán Cortés’s decision to name two of his sons Martin, the elder illegitimate, the younger his lawful heir. (Lanyon’s sources sometimes failed to distinguish between the two.) The author has hit upon an effective technique she employs throughout—to summarize the events and then to slip into the first-person to tell about both her research and her thoughts and feelings as she made her discoveries. This makes for a very engaging narrative. Lanyon calls Martin “a true child of the New World,” one of the first children born to a Spanish invader and an Amerindian woman, a Mayan held in slavery by the Aztec at the time Cortés made his conquests. It’s likely that Martin did not remember much about his mother—when he was six, his father took him to Spain, where the boy served in the court of both Carlos V and Felipe II. Later, Martin returned to Mexico with his brothers (including the other Martin) and watched this other Martin steadily sink into a dissipation that not only ruined his reputation but made him vulnerable to accusations of treason that resulted in the executions of his friends (grisly moments well-described) and the permanent banishment from Mexico of the brothers Cortés. Lanyon’s most wrenching writing comes when Martin Cortés (the good son!) endures torture by rack and water but steadfastly declares his innocence. Later, back in Spain, recovered, Martin died in the military service of the emperor.
Luminous proof that history glows with emotion. (11 b&w illustrations)Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-306-81364-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2004
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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