The breezy tone is a jarring contrast to the considerable scholarship that informs the author’s history.
Like many visitors to the Louvre, journalist Hales (La Bella Lingua: A Passionate Journey through the World’s Most Beautiful Language, 2009, etc.) was fascinated by Leonardo da Vinci’s famous portrait and set out to investigate the real Lisa Gherardini del Giocondo: “Why did the most renowned painter of her time choose her as his model?...And why does her smile enchant us still?”
The author already established her affection for anything Italian in her previous book. Here, she romps through Italy’s roiling political past, eager to make 15th-century figures seem contemporary. Reading letters between one husband and wife, she felt that she was viewing “a medieval version of a television reality show” in which the husband was a “workaholic merchant….I can imagine the stressed-out businessman as a character in a Woody Allen film—perhaps a neurotic, death-obsessed Wall Street trader, with a therapist on speed dial, antacids in his pocket, and Xanax in his medicine cabinet….” Artists in Florence, she insists, “reigned like rock stars.” Inserting herself into the narrative, Hales recounts brief, often banal conversations and discloses her own wide-eyed responses to people, places and things. Upon finding Lisa’s birth certificate: “Leaping out of my chair, I dance in excitement.” Her jaw dropped when she visited a Baroque palace to interview a princess. As for Lisa—wife of a wealthy merchant and mother of seven (one a stepson)—little evidence exists about her life. Hales, then, extrapolates what her life “would have been” from books about Renaissance women. The repetition of “would have,” “might have” and “perhaps” throughout the book gives the narrative—as lively and detailed as it is—a speculative quality. The author also includes a “Mona Lisa Timeline” and a list of key characters.
The breezy tone is a jarring contrast to the considerable scholarship that informs the author’s history.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4516-5896-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
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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