A slice of serious history that’s also pretty as a picture.
An elegant biography, abundant in historical and cultural detail, of the 18th-century pottery magnate.
Josiah Wedgwood (1730–95) played a crucial role in the evolution of English manufacture as it made its way out of feudalism into the industrial age. He was a son of the Enlightenment, aware that he would get the high-quality products he sought only from artisans who got a fair shake in terms of wages and benefits from an employer who recognized their skills and craftsmanship. Wedgwood was willing to provide those benefits, including education for his employees’ children, decent housing, medical benefits (in an industry notorious for poisonous materials that induced health problems), and pensions—all revolutionary notions in those days, as was his belief that his workers understood the value of money. He tinkered tirelessly with qualities of his clay, conducted chemical research to eliminate lead from glazes, and investigated the different kinds of firings being developed around the world, just as he experimented with the idea of a production line. He also cultivated his scant but profitable connections with the aristocracy and the royal household. Wedgwood had to compete on a playing field that included Spode and Sèvres, but his willingness to accept unique commissions won him customers from American colonists to Russian royalty. He worked to standardize products for consistency and availability, with such success that Wedgwood blue jasper ware has been popular for 225 years. Such work, Dolan (Ladies of the Grand Tour, 2001, etc.) reminds readers in a nicely phrased appreciation, “represents elite taste without social prejudice. The name carries the status of an old master, but is accessible to those without aristocratic wealth.” This shrewd portrait of a remarkable life also renders with vivid particularity the time and place in which Wedgwood worked his magic
A slice of serious history that’s also pretty as a picture.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2004
ISBN: 0-670-03346-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 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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