A thorough, careful biography of a talented, deeply evasive English painter whose own contemporaries knew little of him. Bailey, a former staff writer for the New Yorker and author of some 20 books (The Coast of Summer, 1994, etc.), undertook a difficult task in writing this. For even during the artist’s lifetime, Turner took great pains to deny his past, ignoring or obliterating his various tragedies. Nonetheless, Bailey has created a convincing portrait of the man by plowing assiduously through historical records, archives, and earlier biographies. The painter who appears in these pages is anything but a sympathetic character: After his mother was committed to the notorious Bethlehem Hospital for the insane when Turner was just 26, he never spoke of her again. Upon her death just two years later, his secretiveness intensified. Given his subject’s lifelong elusiveness, Bailey has done an admirable job of refracting Turner’s personality through detailed and lively descriptions of his social milieu and the writings of his peers. Apparently, even his contemporaries found this small, bandy-legged, and homely man perplexing. His friend and colleague David Roberts, while acknowledging Turner’s “profound greatness,” for example, also wrote that he was “selfish to an extream . . . [and] cunning, penurious & sensual.” Few ever knew that Turner first lived with one widow, fathered two daughters by her, and subsequently took up with another; he never married either. Of his artistic life, by comparison, much is known: Turner’s talents were recognized in childhood, were fostered in the Royal Academy, and they remained the subject of much debate. Bailey balances each aspect—the personal and the professional—well, and even manages to convey his own compassion for his paradoxical subject. —His contradictions have puzzled many,— he writes, —but they endear him to me.— Without ever denying Turner’s quirks and petty cruelties, Bailey gradually illuminates the artist’s character.
Pub Date: Dec. 31, 1998
ISBN: 0-06-118002-5
Page Count: 512
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
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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