A portrait of England's Queen Bess (1533-1603), which, despite its author's considerable storytelling skills, fails to demonstrate that she was central to England's ``golden age''-and fails to explain her character plausibly. Hibbert (The Days of the French Revolution, 1980; Rome, 1985; The American Revolution Through British Eyes, 1990 knows how to pace a narrative with well-chosen anecdotes and details that deftly summarize major figures (e.g., a memorably ugly French suitor of the queen have ``a nose so large as to appear to be worn as a joke''). He portrays both the public and private monarch in representative moments: riding horses, facing down Parliament and Spanish ambassadors, poring over finances, or speaking eloquently of her love for her subjects. In spite of the biography;s subtitle, this is no simplistic Anglophilic discussion of Queen Elizabeth. Yet, without a fuller discussion of the Tudor monarch's times, her special contribution to her country can't be understood. Moreover, the less attractive facets of this fiercely intelligent, charming queen-vanity, deceit, indecision-seem to come from a vacuum. Her constant disruptions of male expectations, her coquettishness and lifelong refusal to marry, all make little sense. One problem seems to be that her sexuality does not receive the sustained and careful attention given in Lytton Strachey's Elizabeth and Essex. Otherwise, the brilliance of the Elizabethan age seems disconnected from the ruler self-described as having ``the body of a weak and feeble woman, but...the heart and stomach of a king.'' A sharply observed biography that catches Elizabeth in all her complexity, but without a coherent vision of her character. (Sixty color and b&w illustrations.)
Pub Date: April 18, 1991
ISBN: 0-201-15626-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Addison-Wesley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1991
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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