Substantial research informs this sympathetic and vibrant biography. (36 b&w photos)
An important, comprehensive view of the pioneering novelist and playwright (1752–1840).
Burney, who has been enjoying a recent revival (Janice Farrar Thaddeus’s Frances Burney, 2000), has a thorough and compassionate critic in Harman (ed., The Diaries of Sylvia Towsend Warner, 1996). Harman acknowledges that the Burney family archive is so extensive that “scholars grow gray” attempting to digest it, but she has managed well the complications of sifting such literary sands. Harman sees Burney as an inventor, not just of novels and plays, but of her own life (her autobiographical writings are notoriously inaccurate). “Is she an inveterate liar,” asks Harman, “or an inveterate writer?” Her answer is the latter. Burney’s celebrated father, Dr. Charles Burney, musician, writer, and teacher, reared a large family, encouraging his children to enjoy the intellectual life. Fanny, the second daughter, was surprisingly slow to read, but once she began, she never really stopped. She was soon writing regularly and composed and published her first novel (Evelina, 1778) without telling her father. She then had the delicious experience of watching friends and family read and enjoy her novel, without knowing its authorship. Her literary celebrity (which was considerable) was several times interrupted, once by her appointment to the court of George III (Burney attended Queen Charlotte for five years), another time by the rise of Napoleon (when Napoleon declared war on England, she was trapped in France for nine years with her French husband). Although the author’s focus is on Fanny, she periodically explores the careers of her siblings (and her sad son, who preceded her in death), a decision that both enriches Fanny’s story and illustrates how remarkable it was. Included are the agonizing details of Burney’s 1811 mastectomy, performed without anesthetic. Harman notes that Fanny was no feminist and would have been “shocked and distressed” to have been classified as such.
Substantial research informs this sympathetic and vibrant biography. (36 b&w photos)Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2001
ISBN: 0-679-44658-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
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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