Lends exciting textual possibilities to the turmoil beneath Bradstreet’s “glowing breast.”
Poet Gordon offers a thorough, occasionally whimsical, and hearteningly feminist take on the life of early Puritan pioneer and pundit Anne Bradstreet.
The dutiful, extremely learned, favorite daughter of Puritan lawyer and steward Thomas Dudley of Lincolnshire, England, Anne Bradstreet was 18 when her entire family set out in 1630 to lead the Great Migration of Puritans into Massachusetts. Already married to Simon Bradstreet, a devoted, amiable assistant to her father, Anne was reluctant to leave the luxuries of England and did not immediately take to the punishing emigrant life in New England, where (once they survived the horrific trans-Atlantic crossing) many presently died of disease, cold, and malnutrition. But Dudley and his clan were on a godly mission to purge themselves of the corruption of the Old World, to separate from papist idolatry, and found the New Jerusalem—and they constantly moved to forge new Puritan strongholds, from newly founded Boston to Ipswich to Andover. In between bearing and caring for eight children, Anne turned her powerful intellect and encyclopedic knowledge to writing righteous poetry—an inadmissible and risky ambition for a woman in Puritan society, where the famous Anne Hutchinson herself had been drummed out for refusing to toe the theological line, as Gordon amply portrays. While the evidence depicts Bradstreet’s relationship with her husband as passionate, Simon remains a mystery, as Anne developed intense intellectual friendships with men of her circle who encouraged her writing, such as the preacher Nathaniel Ward and her brother-in-law John Woodbridge, who would take her manuscript of poems to England and have them published as the instant bestseller The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America. Gordon, a Boston Univ. doctoral fellow, devotes careful attention to the roots of Puritanism and to portrayals of its major players, such as John Cotton; her own sensitivity as a poet renders rapturous readings of Bradstreet’s writing.
Lends exciting textual possibilities to the turmoil beneath Bradstreet’s “glowing breast.”Pub Date: March 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-316-16904-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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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