Transcending the usual lifestyles-of-the-rich-and-famous sensationalism, Stasz (American Dreamers, 1988, etc.) here creates a captivating and thoughtful blend of social history and family chronicle. Blessed with unassailable pedigree and unimaginable wealth, the Vanderbilt women, argues Stasz, present a tantalizing illustration of ``the unfolding of female rebellion from one generation to the next.'' Allotting space and considerable understanding to the expected social matrons and neglected wives (and not slighting abundant and well-known scandals), the author takes particular delight in the many Vanderbilt renegades. Chief among them is the extraordinary Alva Smith, who turned her considerable energies from the task of conquering society (finding a suitably rich husband in sportsman William K. Vanderbilt; breaking the ``old money'' barriers maintained by the formidable Mrs. Astor—of ``400'' fame—with her spectacular social extravaganzas) to that of shocking it. Divorcing the philandering ``Willie,'' she married sympathetic aesthete (and millionaire) Harry Belmont, and, as the widowed Mrs. Belmont, became a startlingly progressive and hard-working leader of the women's movement (advocating not just suffrage, but equal rights). A quieter rebel, her niece Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, the other star of Stasz's study, became a notable sculptor and patron of the arts, supporting and championing the American artists who clustered around her Greenwich Village studio, and later founding the Whitney Museum. Unfortunately, as Stasz ably points out, the very real accomplishments of these women (and of Gertrude's famous niece Gloria, sympathetically portrayed here as far more than an earnest dilettante) were often belittled (not least by themselves) due to their immense wealth. Their most striking characteristic, the author notes, is that, consigned to a ``women's sphere'' that isolated them from the power reserved for male descendants, they used their freedom and resources to carve stubbornly individual existences. A deft, delightful, and compulsively readable mixture of gossip and feminist history. (Twenty-four pages of b&w photos—not seen.)
Pub Date: Dec. 2, 1991
ISBN: 0-312-06486-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1991
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
PERSPECTIVES
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
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