One-dimensional characters undermine the potential drama of life within a castle.
The fortunes and misfortunes of the famous Vanderbilts.
At the end of the 19th century, the Biltmore House in Asheville, North Carolina, was the biggest, grandest, most opulent home in America. Set on 125,000 acres, the 175,000-square-foot mansion contained 250 rooms, 43 bathrooms, 3 kitchens, 65 fireplaces, and a 72-foot-long banquet hall. Eight million bricks cloaked its 750-foot facade, and a massive dining table could seat more than 70 guests. Filled with art and sculpture, the house was the pride and obsession of George Washington Vanderbilt II (1862-1914), grandson of the shipping and railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt. Biltmore House is the setting for Kiernan’s (The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II, 2013, etc.) family history, featuring George and his wife, Edith Dresser. Unfortunately, the house itself emerges as a livelier presence than its inhabitants. George was a mystery even to his best friend, who called him “cold-blooded,” moody, and reticent. He enjoyed napping and reading. “You know I do not for a moment envy the position of GV,” his friend noted. “He is not one speck as happy as I am, and the spending of money gives him absolutely no thrill.” He seemed not interested in women, either, but at the age of 35, “America’s richest bachelor” became engaged to Edith, the well-bred, though not wealthy, daughter of a noted New York family whose ancestors included Manhattan governor Peter Stuyvesant. Kiernan discloses little about their personalities and nothing about their courtship or relationship as husband and wife. She does chronicle their wedding, honeymoon, return to Asheville, and many other travels as well as the declining fortunes that made Biltmore an exceedingly expensive undertaking. Edith engaged in much charity work before and after George’s sudden death. The couple had one child, but the author hardly looks at her relationship with her parents, focusing mostly on the family’s financial woes, which became increasingly dire.
One-dimensional characters undermine the potential drama of life within a castle.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4767-9404-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
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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