Rich, allusive, learned, delightful. (42 illustrations)
A perceptive British museum director speculates on the significance of architectural ruins for artists, writers, and the rest of us.
The author wastes no time establishing his literary and artistic credentials: the first page alone contains allusions to Henry James, The Planet of the Apes, Gustave Doré, and “Ozymandias.” (Shelley’s entire sonnet appears later, as does a lengthy disquisition on his second wife’s dystopian novel, The Last Man.) But Woodward’s considerable skills as a writer make all this—and much more—go down easily; not a breath of pretension emanates from his engaging, illuminating volume. Eleven essays connected by theme and style discuss ruins of all sorts—crumbling antiquities, restorations (some he likes, some he abhors), war-damaged landmarks, even “ruins” created in the age of the picturesque to please the eye and engage the imagination. Woodward roams the Western world (mostly) to examine a variety of sites ranging from Lord Byron’s Newstead Abbey to Dresden’s Frauenkirche, destroyed by Allied bombers in WWII. (An equal-opportunity historian, he examines the responses in England to the Nazi bombing of English churches: some were razed, some, like Coventry, established as memorials.) At Rome’s Baths of Caracalla, in whose lush, verdurous ruins Shelley composed much of Prometheus Unbound, Woodward notes that the poet would not today find much inspiration; assiduous archaeologists have employed weed-killers and a rigid notion of preservation to destroy the allure of the site, which is now all stone and keep-off-the-grass signs. Woodward romantically argues that nature and the ruin must interact if the site is to inspire the artistic imagination. (His own volume, of course, is a counter-argument: he found fecundity in the infertility at Caracalla.) In his essay on the ruins of war and what to do about them, one wonders why he neglects the sites of the Nazi death camps: Auschwitz decays; Bergen-Belsen does not.
Rich, allusive, learned, delightful. (42 illustrations)Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-42199-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2002
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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