Richly detailed and nuanced: a model of literary biography, and an illumination for students of Hawthorne’s work. (For an...
A thoughtful, absorbing life of the gloomy prince of American literature.
Born Nathaniel Hathorne in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1802, the reluctant hero of Wineapple’s (Sister Brother, 1996, etc.) tale wanted nothing more than to take up the family tradition of seafaring: “his earliest compositions,” she writes, “were said to have been sea stories about bronzed pirates and hardy privateers.” His desire may have been less for seaborne adventure than for simple escape, for, Wineapple ably shows, Hawthorne was always a man apart, one who believed that the writer was “a citizen of another country,” one with no specific point on the map. With a taste for drama and plenty of self-doubt, Hawthorne burned much of his early work (“I am as tractable an author as you ever knew,” he wrote to an editor, “so far as putting my articles into the fire goes; though I cannot abide alterations or omissions”), then took a job as a customs inspector “not because he needed the money or because the country ignored its artists—though both were true—but because he liked it,” and went on to write an exquisite body of short stories and novels that, though now standards of American literature, went little noticed for much of his life. (The first edition of Twice-Told Tales sold only a few hundred copies and was unceremoniously remaindered, and other of his books met much the same fate.) Hawthorne, writes Wineapple, nursed a dark, critical view of life, observing that his Scarlet Letter was “a h–ll fired story, into which I found it almost impossible to throw any cheering light.” His refusal to endorse the abolitionist cause (on which point Wineapple provides a brilliant reading of The Blithedale Romance) and his opposition to the Civil War led detractors to say that he stood for “doubt, darkness, and the Democratic Party.” More difficult, Wineapple writes with much sympathy, were his relations with his children, who bore the burden of his fame and genius over the course of their troubled lives.
Richly detailed and nuanced: a model of literary biography, and an illumination for students of Hawthorne’s work. (For an excerpt of Hawthorne, go to www.kirkusreviews.com.)Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-40044-3
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2003
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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