Poorly conceived and stylistically weak: Sand deserves more critical and detached treatment.
A biography of the 19th-century author that succeeds in highlighting the need for a new account of Sand’s life—without providing one.
Aurore Dupin (better known as George Sand) was controversial and conflicted practically from the day of her birth in 1804. Her father was an aristocrat who had married a prostitute without his otherwise liberal family’s sanction; his death ignited a complex feud between Aurore’s highly imaginative and rather unstable mother (whom she adored) and her socially conventional but politically progressive grandmother (who eventually took over her education). The scenes of public violence and private drama that marked Sand’s early life clearly informed her later career, driven as it was by sexual and political fervor and a remarkable talent for self-dramatization. Jack (French/Christ Church, Oxford) purports to explore the “inner life” of her subject by considering Sand’s mistaken marriage, emergent writing career, and long string of lovers almost exclusively in Sand’s own terms, culled chiefly from her 1854 autobiography and voluminous letters. Jack acknowledges that the story she tells is “highly condensed,” but the intended effect of such “interpretive biography” is a failure, chiefly because of the gaps in the narrative, which render it too incoherent to support any specific view or argument. For example, though Sand’s love affairs are meticulously chronicled, we learn nothing about the processes—inner or outer—by which she established the large and distinguished circle of correspondents that generated her most enduring writing; nor are we offered any account of how and when her relations with her daughter Solonge degenerated, let alone why. Many similarly important developments in Sand’s life appear suddenly as faits accomplis, subject to brief commentary, without sustained explanation or analysis. While such abridgements might be justified in a critical study, they are unacceptable in biography, especially when written for a general readership unfamiliar with Sand to begin with.
Poorly conceived and stylistically weak: Sand deserves more critical and detached treatment.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2000
ISBN: 0-679-45501-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2000
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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