Substantial and thoughtful, written with sympathy and affection. (16 pages b&w illustrations; 40 additional b&w...
A critic and novelist (English Settlement, not reviewed, etc.) examines the short, stressful life (1811–63) of the great Victorian writer.
An unabashed Thackeray fan, Taylor begins with the novelist’s death on Christmas Eve and informs us that 2,000 people attended the interment of a man whose prodigious output in periodicals and serial novels exceeded one million words between 1846 and 1850. (He also wrote up to 2,000 letters per year.) In a volume with a generous supply of illustrations (many by Thackeray himself, who had started out as the proverbial starving artist), the author traces the Thackeray family back to a band of Yorkshire yeomen. Later generations worked for the East India Company. (Returning to England from India, where he was born, the five-year-old Thackeray glimpsed Napoleon at St. Helena.) Taylor follows Thackeray through Charterhouse School, then to Cambridge (he left with substantial gambling debts but no degree). After struggling as an artist, Thackeray worked for various publications, most notably Punch, before he began writing novels. He married in 1836, but his wife suffered from mental illness and spent most of her adulthood in private care. Taylor describes keenly the competition between Thackeray and his principal rival, Charles Dickens; their fragile amity was shattered in the late 1850s when Thackeray sided with Dickens’s abandoned wife. (Dickens did write a generous testimonial in Cornhill, the monthly that Thackeray edited.) Taylor portrays Thackeray as a gentle giant (he was 6’3”) and as a man who loved his daughters (he shaved a moustache because it frightened them) and who wrote what Taylor considers the finest of all Victorian novels, Vanity Fair. As Peter Ackroyd did in Dickens (1990), Taylor employs his talents as a novelist to include scraps of invention (e.g., a death notice by George Eliot); he inserts, as well, a couple of discursive interludes. (Scholars, however, will find the notes insufficient and will rue the absence of a chronology and comprehensive list of Thackeray’s works.)
Substantial and thoughtful, written with sympathy and affection. (16 pages b&w illustrations; 40 additional b&w illustrations throughout)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7867-0910-3
Page Count: 512
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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