A handsomely illustrated volume that reflects Benfey’s depth of reading and passionate interests, though the connections he...
Ambitious, eccentric synthesis of late 19th-century artistic currents shows a static America progressing after the Civil War into a period of movement and romance.
As evidenced by his previous teeming works, Benfey (The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan, 2003, etc.) likes to keep the literary pot boiling. In this elegant but not entirely cohesive study, he uses the hummingbird as a metaphor for the postwar era’s evanescent spirit, and as a means of spotlighting the shared interests of the actors he has assembled. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a radical writer who served as a colonel in the Union army, published essays about hummingbirds that were read avidly by Emily Dickinson, who in turn wove the birds into poems and wrote to Higginson for literary advice. Harriet Beecher Stowe, credited by President Lincoln with starting the Civil War with Uncle Tom’s Cabin, sheltered, named and drew pictures of a wounded hummingbird, which Benfey argues became a stand-in for her troubled, alcoholic son Fred. Martin Johnson Heade, recognized for his paintings of salt marshes and haystacks, traveled to Brazil to paint hummingbirds; his work was beloved by Stowe and her brother, abolitionist preacher Henry Ward Beecher, for whom the bird was a metaphor for the delicate female parishioners he seduced. Heade’s comely apprentice and crush, Mabel Todd, mingled with the Dickinsons in Amherst, Mass., offering Emily her sketches of hummingbirds while having an affair with the poet’s brother Austin; Mabel later helped bring Emily’s work to the public light. One life dovetails into the other in this spiraling contemplation, which shows itinerant journalist Mark Twain emerging from his own trip to the tropics “at a critical moment of self-recognition,” recognizing that Heade had undertaken “a kindred quest.”
A handsomely illustrated volume that reflects Benfey’s depth of reading and passionate interests, though the connections he makes are occasionally strained.Pub Date: April 21, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59420-160-8
Page Count: 278
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2008
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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