A solid addition to the literature about one of the 20th century’s most influential American writers.
A slim biography puts the good Doctor and his oeuvre on the couch for some gentle analysis.
In the preface, Pease (English, Comparative Literature, African-American Literature/Dartmouth Univ.) gives a brief overview of existing Seuss scholarship and locates his work within it as “a modest effort to explore” the “relationship between Dr. Seuss’s art and Geisel’s life.” The author—who was awarded the Ted and Helen Geisel Chair in the Humanities at Dartmouth, Geisel’s alma mater—proceeds in largely chronological fashion. He sketches Geisel’s childhood in Springfield, Mass., the child of two prominent German-immigrant families and scion of the Geisel brewery dynasty. The double whammy of World War I and Prohibition was a trauma, writes Pease, that Geisel spent the first part of his career working to exorcise. His anti-authoritarian streak was cultivated as editor of the Jack-O-Lantern, Dartmouth’s humor magazine, from which he was fired for drunken shenanigans. Pease consistently refers to his subject as “Ted,” “Geisel” or “Dr. Seuss” depending on the context, a device that works well in advancing his thesis: “Dr. Seuss was no longer reconstructing Ted’s boyhood experience; in [The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins and The King’s Stilts] he was teaching moral lessons. Geisel’s democratic impulses and his liberal humanitarianism are evident in both works.” Drawing on Geisel’s writings and speeches as well as secondary sources both contemporary and retrospective, Pease drives his narrative forward, occasionally indulging in lit-crit gobbledygook (If I Ran the Zoo and If I Ran the Circus “both introduce a hypothetical frame that suspends the provenance of the adult’s insistence on empirically verifiable reality”). For the most part, though, he argues his points cleanly, and his readings of his subject’s books will engage readers. In his sparkling exegesis of The Cat in the Hat, the author interprets the Cat “as the activity of reading personified.”
A solid addition to the literature about one of the 20th century’s most influential American writers.Pub Date: April 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-19-532302-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
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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