A fine work of literary and cultural history.
A sparkling, wonderfully readable biography of the English official less well known for his contributions to good government than for his salacious, achingly self-doubtful diaries.
Plenty of tidbits from those diaries make their way into this thorough, richly detailed portrait by English writer Tomalin (Jane Austen: A Life, 1997, etc.): on one page we find Pepys (1633–1703) chasing after a servant girl and castigating himself for his success, on another recording a moment of sexual pleasure with which he graced his long-suffering wife—and then worrying whether she might “get a trick of liking it,” as no seemly woman should in those days. Sex was much on Pepys’s mind throughout his adult life, as was the attendant guilt; and there many biographers have left the matter. Tomalin, however, brings us the rest of Pepys’s story, notably his accomplishments as a businessman and naval administrator, one of the chief architects of the royal fleet that would soon after his time extend England’s empire to every corner of the world. Pepys entered the civil service in an era when officials were expected to enrich themselves at the public expense; indeed, Tomalin writes, one of the first bits of advice he received from a sea captain concerned “how to fiddle his expenses by listing five or six non-existent servants when he went on board and claiming pay for them all.” Though Pepys earned a fortune himself while in service, he conducted himself honorably and made noteworthy reforms, insisting that the navy’s accounts be squared and suppliers paid what they were owed (and nothing more). He also managed, more than once, to fall on the wrong side of events, backing King James, for example, in his struggle to keep the crown; forced into retirement, he spent his days with the likes of John Dryden talking about the works of Chaucer, his nights revisiting his remarkable diary—the product, Tomalin writes, “of both the most ordinary and the most extraordinary writer you will ever know.”
A fine work of literary and cultural history.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-41143-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2002
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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