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JANE AUSTEN

A LIFE

While this much-needed revisionist biography sheds new light on the great novelist, it too often obscures the facts of her life behind webs of speculation about what she and her intimates might have thought or felt. Just before her early death in 1817 at age 41, Jane Austen wrote to a niece, ``Pictures of Perfection make me sick & wicked.'' It is ironic, then, that the novelist's family and subsequent biographers should have endeavored to conceal her (and her family's) blemishes. Displaying an impressive command of the Austen archives, Nokes (English Literature/Univ. of London) in contrast highlights various Austen family scandals and exposes how Austen's own mercurial character, for all its virtues, had its vicious side. He shows one of Austen's cousins to have quite likely been the illegitimate daughter of Warren Hastings, the controversial governor of British India; he also attends closely to an aunt's humiliating brush with the law. Nokes eschews anachronistic labels: He portrays Austen not as a modern genius awaiting recognition, but as the sometimes romantic, sometimes caustic wit her family knew. Over and beyond his recognition of how family scandal helped inspire Austen's romantic imagination and solidify her moral sense, Nokes contributes to Austen studies with a series of local observations: He questions, for example, the conventional wisdom that Austen found her sojourn in Bath traumatic. His desire to recreate the world and the writer known to Austen's intimates, however, leads Nokes to indulge overmuch in florid, novelistic renderings of the Austens' various points of view. It would be hard to blame general readers for preferring Valerie Grosvenor Myer's straightforward and accessible sketch of Austen from earlier this year (p. 360). Nokes's portrait of a less-than-perfect Austen, then, while it offers new insights and a wealth of detail, employs too much imagination and takes too narrow a perspective to finally satisfy. (b&w illustrations, not seen)

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1997

ISBN: 0-374-11326-2

Page Count: 512

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1997

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INTO THE WILD

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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

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

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WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...

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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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