Another nicely flowing entry in the big biography stream, as British as Eric Blore. (32 pp. b&w photos)
Sizable first installment of an authorized three-volume biography deals with the poet’s origins, education, and larking about with Britain’s Bright Young Things between the world wars.
Former London Times editor Hillier, who has spent 25 years researching the life of John Betjeman (1906–1984), here covers the period from the poet’s Islington childhood through his marriage in 1933 to Penelope Chetwode, a fierce field-marshal’s daughter whose voice “had an almost ventriloquial timbre, like that of a Punch-and-Judy man using his swazzle.” Primary education, begun at the sadistic Dragon School, finished with Betjeman boarding at Marlborough. He never took a degree at Magdalen College, Oxford, but managed to take part in the theatricals, literary publications, and homosexual posing that characterized the time and place. Joining the aesthetes with vigor, Betjeman produced antic prose, poetry, and pranks while chumming around with Auden, Osbert Lancaster, Kenneth Clark, the Mitford sisters. For these classic British eccentrics in the making, “businessman” was the ultimate pejorative, so when obliged to support himself, young John wrote for The Architectural Review, acted as private secretary for a superannuated politician, and became a lively schoolmaster, accompanied everywhere by his familiar teddy bear, Archibald. Betjeman’s story is sure to entertain chronically anglophilic Yanks, who will adore even such walk-ons as “Green the college lamplighter, known as ‘Bloater Bill,’ and Emma Higgins of ‘C’ House wardrobe, who retired in 1923 after 62 years’ service.” They’ll also have a jolly good time with the copious servings of Betjeman’s poetry, written when such stuff often rhymed and always scanned. It may smack of Wordsworth and the Victorians but just as frequently it recalls Odgen Nash. Withal, the juvenile doggerel, the adult verse, and the generous extracts from correspondence consistently amuse. Future volumes will tell if Betjeman the radio and TV raconteur or Betjeman, Versificator Regis, pleases as much.
Another nicely flowing entry in the big biography stream, as British as Eric Blore. (32 pp. b&w photos)Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7195-6488-3
Page Count: 476
Publisher: John Murray Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2003
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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