A tantalizing glimpse of a lost world. Although she asks the question in her preface, Pevitt never directly reveals an answer as to why someone at the end of the 20th century would become obsessed with someone dead for 300 years. Readers are forced to answer that question themselves, and they might be glad that Pevitt became so involved in a figure who, until now, has not received sympathetic treatment in English. French historians have for some time now been taking a new look at the duc d`OrlÇans, recognizing that he was much more than the philanderer and intellectual lightweight he had been made out to be. When his uncle the Sun King, Louis XIV, died in 1715, a remarkable era came to an end. While the five-year-old Louis XV became de jure king, it was Philippe who actually ruled as regent. In some ways a Renaissance man (he was a musician and artist as well as a soldier and statesman), Philippe delighted in shocking the more conventional members of the royal family and court. Extraordinary rumors (including the claim that he had slept with his own daughter) circulated through aristocratic circles. This, though, seems to have been a calculated strategy to hide his rather formidable talents. As regent, Pevitt argues, he displayed considerable iamgination and energy. He worked hard to rebuild the country's armed forces, began negotiations with England, France's ancient antagonist, and did what he could to spur on emigration to North America. (His efforts are indicated by the fact that New Orleans was named in his honor). Pevitt is not a professional historian, but this in no way detracts from her work; in fact, readers might find her style refreshing and thankfully free from academic pretensions. It seems that she wrote the book for no other reason than that the subject fascinated her—and what better reason could a reader ask for in an author?
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-87113-695-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1997
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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