A lively, engaging, concise biography of a novel.
The life and times of a “glittering futurist extravaganza.”
Biographer and novelist Taylor (Rock and Roll Is Life, 2018, etc.) describes George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four as “an exposé of the totalitarian mind,” perhaps the “first Cold War novel,” and “one of the key texts necessary for an understanding of the twenty-first century.” High praise for a book Orwell (1903-1950) laconically described to his publisher in 1947 as a “fantasy, but in the form of a naturalistic novel.” Taylor’s 2003 biography of Orwell won the Whitbread Book Award for Biography. Here, he zeroes in on Orwell’s final book. He delves deeply and brightly into the making of the novel, its inspiration, how Orwell wrote it, and how it was received critically, socially, and politically then and afterward. It took Orwell five years to write. He was quite ill and in hibernation on the rugged Isle of Jura, off Scotland’s coast, and died less than a year after it was published in 1949. “By writing about the terrors that obsessed him,” writes Taylor, “he had got them out of his system.” The novel is a “devastating analysis of the corruption of language,” a “dystopian horror world…and more.” Taylor also deftly shows how “many of its incidental fragments turn out to have been robbed wholesale from the life that ran along beside it.” He demonstrates how Orwell generated the narrative while also continuing to contribute to magazines, exploring the political and social landscape. The 1943 Allied leaders’ Tehran Conference gave “his consciousness a decisive kick, and he was able to clarify his vision for Nineteen Eighty-Four after he read Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We. Before Orwell died, he believed “something resembling [the fascist society depicted in Nineteen Eighty-Four] could arrive.” Taylor provides a good introduction to the work, but for more detail on the novel’s impact on popular culture, look to Dorian Lynskey’s The Ministry of Truth.
A lively, engaging, concise biography of a novel.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3800-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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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