7943753.395 Donoghue, Denis WALTER PATER Elegant close readings of seminal modern aesthete Pater's passionate criticism coexist uneasily here with an oddly tentative biographical study of him. Donoghue (English/New York Univ.; The Old Moderns, 1994, etc.) sets out to trace how Pater invented a style that would become central to modern culture, by outlining the way in which he connected the modernisms of Wilde, Yeats, Joyce, and Eliot to antiquity, the Renaissance, and the Romantics. But in biographical sketches, Donoghue falls into some of the bad habits of the literary hagiographer. At times he seems unable to see the society for the eminent personages. (Symptomatic of this problem are several chapter titles that simply string together names— ``Hopkins, Oscar Browning, Simeon Solomon, Symonds.'') Nor does Donoghue entirely escape fetishizing things British and Victorian. The fierce intellectual battles over religion that captivated Pater's Oxford seem rather a lark; Donoghue's delicate treatment of the 'homoerotic disposition' common to Pater and his circle, while it avoids sensationalism, seems almost to take their age of closets and codes on its own terms. Those familiar with Donoghue's often polemical reviews may be struck by the lack of motivation these chapters exhibit. In contrast, his book's much stronger second half, where he surveys Pater's output and places it in perspective, finds Donoghue struggling—in the best sense of the word—with issues of aesthetics and politics. Rehabilitating Pater, the champion of art for art's sake, becomes, paradoxically, a means to rescue art and aesthetics from ``the rough strife of ideologues.'' Donoghue mixes it up admirably on Pater's behalf, turning weapons of cultural and even deconstructive criticism to the purpose of legitimating aestheticism as an alternative mode of consciousness. Readers will delight in Pater's worldview and in Donoghue's technique; the contradictions of the latter's project, meanwhile, may prove instructive to both readers and author.
Pub Date: April 2, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-43753-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1995
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
