Miss du Maurier, prolific author—of novels, travel books, biographies, short stories, plays—here indulges herself (her phrase) by writing out her "thoughts, impressions, and actions" from the age of three until the publication of her first novel, and her marriage, at twenty-five, in an engaging foreword, she hopes to encourage "young writers, as unsure of themselves as I once was, to try their hand." One wishes the book might have that effect, but there may be a generation and class gap impeding. After ali, Daphne, the second of a trio of engaging girls, was the daughter of the famous actor-producer Gerald du Maurier and the granddaughter of the author of those nearly forgotton novels, Trilby and Peter Ibbetson. She was a baby in an age of nannies and prams, and entered society in time to dance with that Prince of Wales who ended up as Duke of Windsor. A creative family, a warm matrix against which young Daphne was always rebelling. Her adolescent diaries show her as withdrawn, withdrawing, from the lively family circle, to read, write, and act out her fantasies of adventure, peril, escape—with an overturned chair for a man-o'-war, and her younger sister's friends as willing actors. In the second half of the book, she merely strings journal entries together; in the first, undocumented half, she does a brilliant job of rethinking, recreating, a child in her world. The moral? She is a better novelist than journal-keeper.
Pub Date: Sept. 23, 1977
ISBN: 184408096X
Page Count: 195
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1977
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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