Could well encourage a new generation to read Longfellow.
A sprightly, long-needed biography of 19th-century America's most famous, myth-making poet.
Shortly after his death at age 75 in 1882, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow fell out of fashion. Though he had been wildly acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic and enriched by a lifelong dedication to writing poetry, he was an easy target for modernists, who disdained his work as sentimental, derivative of Europeans, preachy, unironic, and even racist in its Indian depictions. Calhoun, who previously wrote a history of Longfellow’s alma mater (A Small College in Maine: Two Hundred Years of Bowdoin, 1993), notes there hasn’t been a competent biography of Longfellow since Newton Arvin’s critical study in 1962. Yet this descendant of Harvard-educated gentlemen farmers and lawyers blazed many a trail from his birthplace in Portland, Maine, to his longtime residence in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Longfellow was a pioneering professor of modern languages and literatures at Harvard, where he taught for 18 years. He drew on folk myths such as the Finnish Kalevala long before Ezra Pound made the practice fashionable. He was the first to address what we now call ethnic cleansing in such poems as “Evangeline,” which depicted the tragedy of the Acadians in Nova Scotia; the first to solidify an American identity from Native stories (“The Song of Hiawatha”) and emblematic colonial characters such as Priscilla Alden, Paul Revere, and Miles Standish; and the first to bring Dante to the general American public. Calhoun even asserts that Longfellow’s rural sketch “Kavanagh” portrays the first lesbian relationship in US fiction. Moreover, the author presents an enormously sympathetic portrait of a universally admired gentleman who shunned public speaking, avoided taking stands on divisive issues such as slavery (despite the urging of his best friend, Senator Charles Sumner), and was devoted to his family. Calhoun’s comprehensive bibliography makes this additionally valuable as a veritable primer of Victorian America.
Could well encourage a new generation to read Longfellow.Pub Date: June 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-8070-7026-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2004
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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