Gilmour charts Curzon’s life through success and failure, turning in a well-formed view of the late imperial era in the...
A magisterial life of the renowned British politician and empire-builder.
Like his near-contemporary Rudyard Kipling, the subject of Gilmour’s recent The Long Recessional (2002), George Nathaniel Curzon believed that Europe had a duty to bring civilization to the non-European world. Curzon’s belief had a decidedly paternalistic component. As viceroy of India, he believed that his subjects were not necessarily corrupt, but certainly degenerate; Gilmour writes that “he found them childlike and often aggravating, but there can be no doubt that he liked them.” Curzon came by a sense of hauteur honestly, having been descended from a family that traced its ancestry to one of William the Conqueror’s lieutenants; yet he dismissed those ancestors as “a feeble lot,” arguing that the family would not have possessed the same estate since the 12th century “had they manifested the very slightest energy or courage.” Say what you will about his beliefs—and plenty of critics, including Winston Churchill and Lloyd George, twitted him for one thing or another at every turn—Curzon was indeed energetic and courageous, and he explored and wrote about vast portions of Central Asia before settling in to a four-decade career in imperial administration. In this work he had checkered success, for Curzon was not particularly well liked at home, in part because he was so openly contemptuous of his lessers and colleagues (and, one suspects, the royals as well). Too, writes Gilmour, Curzon often swam against the tide of world events, arguing in the wake of WWI that Egypt should not be granted independence and that Britain should not give in to nationalist movements in its colonies. Still, as subsequent events have shown, he was often right, as when he agitated for an independent Kurdistan against protests from Ottoman diplomats—sniffing, of course, that “he could tell a Kurd from a Turk any day of the week.”
Gilmour charts Curzon’s life through success and failure, turning in a well-formed view of the late imperial era in the bargain. An outstanding biography of an important historical figure.Pub Date: June 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-374-13356-5
Page Count: 728
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
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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