A fresh, knowledgeable introduction to life, love, war, and rivalries in ancient Rome.
The short life of Rome’s first lyric poet.
Journalist and classicist Dunn (translator: The Poems of Catullus, 2016) reveals the “uncertain and turbulent times” of ancient Rome in this appreciative, informed biography of Catullus. Dying before he was 30, Catullus produced 117 poems “full of emotion, wit, and lurid insight into some of the key Roman personalities.” Melding many literary genres, his poems’ “apparent simplicity…often masks far greater, deeper sentiment and subtlety of thought,” and he influenced later writers, including Ovid, Virgil, Horace, and Roman satirists. Central to Dunn’s study is Catullus’ longest poem, which she appends to this biography. She calls it his “Bedspread Poem” because it describes in detail the myths incorporated into the sumptuous wedding bedspread of one of Jason’s Argonauts. “The bedspread,” she writes, “was a visual web of words” that evoked history and mythology to create “a miniature epic.” Dunn constructs her narrative around Catullus’ verse, which she has translated from the Latin. “I see this very much as a joint venture: Catullus provides the poetry; I offer something of the world that informed it.” That world was peopled by Cicero, the wealthy orator and statesman, who sought to bolster stability by strengthening Rome’s Senate; ambitious Julius Caesar, a friend of Catullus’ father, who “cemented his claim to Rome through dictatorship”; and the poet’s beloved, Clodia Metelli, a married woman of at least 35 who appeared to him as a “shining goddess.” He gave her the pseudonym Lesbia and made her the subject of a spate of erotic love poems. Lesbia became the poet’s “raison d’etre.” Among many revelations about Roman culture, Dunn speculates that because their affair produced no child, either Clodia or Catullus might have used some method of herbal or barrier contraception.
A fresh, knowledgeable introduction to life, love, war, and rivalries in ancient Rome.Pub Date: July 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-231702-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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
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