Like many volumes on the groaning shelf of Orwelliana, this reads more like a conversation with fellow monomaniacs than...
Carping portrait of the English patron saint of left-wing anti-communism, by a biographer who displayed a lot more enthusiasm for Thackeray (2001).
Although Taylor writes that George Orwell (1903–50) “has obsessed me for the best part of a quarter of a century,” the principal sign of his obsession here is endless quibbling with other Orwell observers’ comments, which may or may not be familiar to readers of this work. Moreover, most of these comments are critical—Orwell was self-pitying, he was paranoid, he condescended to the working classes he professed to admire—and are refuted perfunctorily. (A particularly nasty diatribe from a Marxist guide to English literature is reprinted over three pages without any comment at all.) Certainly, in recent years much has come to light about the less attractive features of the author revered for his painfully honest scrutiny of socialism in The Road to Wigan Pier, his superb reporting from the front lines of the Spanish Civil War in Homage to Catalonia, and most of all for his scathing fictional depictions of totalitarianism, Animal Farm and 1984. But a biography ought to at least convey the qualities that made Orwell an increasingly important, controversial figure in English literary and political circles of the 1930s and ’40s. The account of his early years as the son of a British colonial official, a scholarship boy at Eton, and a policeman in Burma is similarly shaped by the desire to cut Orwell down to size; his later reminiscences of those days, Taylor informs us, were highly selective and crafted with an eye to political symbolism—not exactly unusual strategies in autobiographical writing. Impressionistic chapters on “Orwell’s face,” “Orwell’s voice” (horrors: he retained his upper-class accent), “Orwell’s things,” and on and on, do not further illuminate the personality of an admittedly reserved man who entirely fails to come to life in these pages.
Like many volumes on the groaning shelf of Orwelliana, this reads more like a conversation with fellow monomaniacs than something for the general public. (16 pp. b&w illustrations, not seen)Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2003
ISBN: 0-8050-7473-2
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2003
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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