Du Maurier began this story with Golden Lads (1975), a study of the young Bacon and his beloved older brother Anthony, ending with Anthony's death in 1601. The present volume follows the mature lawyer, politician, and thinker through the remaining 25 years of his astonishing life. High office had eluded Bacon under Elizabeth; with the accession of James I in 1603 he began his gradual ascent to the Lord Chancellor's woolsack through a succession of lofty legal posts anti convenient friendships with important persons. His rise was curiously intertwined with the ominous issue of royal prerogative and the career of its most stalwart judicial opponent, Bacon's inveterate rival Sir Edward Coke. Attorney-General Bacon and the great Chief Justice of Common Pleas (once rivals for the hand of the same woman) took up opposing—and prophetic—lines of argument as to how far the common law and the judiciary should be servants to the Crown. During the same crowded decades this frail hypochondriac was writing legal works of some importance, revising and expanding his Essays in successive editions, drawing up white papers and propositions for legal reform, and publishing various parts of the encyclopedic scheme he was devising for the restructuring of "philosophy" (i.e., higher learning) in accordance with something like empirical methods. Du Maurier narrates this prodigious career smoothly but glibly, leaving us rather at a loss to account for the Lord Chancellor's stunning (and still controversial) 1621 confession to charges of receiving bribes. Most legal and intellectual issues are digested into trivial pablum, and the frequent coy references to the Shakespearean-authorship question do nothing to reassure anyone of Du Maurier's scholarly judgment. Catherine Drinker Bowen's The Lion and The Throne (1956; a biography of Coke) and Francis Bacon: The Temper of A Man (1963) remain the layman's guides par excellence to this material.
Pub Date: Jan. 21, 1976
ISBN: 1844080749
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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