A richly introspective biography sure to rekindle interest in Hardy’s writing.
Another wonderfully readable life by veteran biographer and journalist Tomalin (Samuel Pepys, 2002, etc.).
She always builds a good story, and this slow but touching biography of the mild-mannered provincial architect from Dorchester who created seething novels about inequity and thwarted ambition is no exception. Tomalin begins at the death in 1912 of Hardy’s once-beloved first wife Emma, from whom he grew estranged in their last years; evidently he began to compose poetry seriously at this juncture as a way of revisiting their romance and his early life. Born in 1840 to a domestic servant who had to hurry up and get married before his birth, Hardy later became aware that he was an unwanted child whose existence stunted his mother’s chances of bettering herself. He served as an apprentice to an architect in Dorchester, then quit to seek his literary fortunes in London, attending reform meetings and making publishing contacts. After marrying wellborn Cornishwoman Emma Gifford, he settled back in Dorset to build his own house and live quietly among the laboring villagers. The humiliating rejection of his early novels rankled, and for many years after he finally got published, it was in serial form for quick money, much like Dickens and Eliot. Far from the Madding Crowd, which delineated the grim rural life that Hardy knew intimately, made his reputation as a socialist, feminist and gorgeous describer of nature. Hardy’s worldview grew more pessimistic, “marked by a fierce questioning of accepted ideas about society,” and it is evidenced in works including The Return of the Native, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, The Mayor of Casterbridge and Hardy’s bleak rewrite of the Book of Job, Jude the Obscure. Tomalin thoughtfully considers these works, and the poignant marriage of Hardy to Em, in a text brimming with insight.
A richly introspective biography sure to rekindle interest in Hardy’s writing.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2007
ISBN: 1-59420-118-8
Page Count: 452
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2006
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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