Opting consistently for romance and fashion instead of analysis and criticism, this would fit well in the Harlequin...
Bubbly biography of the three effervescent Jerome sisters, each of whom married a titled Englishman who subsequently pricked a few of the bubbles.
The text begins grimly enough, at the 1894 deathbed of Lord Randolph Churchill, whose syphilis-induced madness gives wife Jennie (1854–1921) leisure to write to her sisters and thus provide first-time author Kehoe with a way to introduce Clara (1851–1935) and Leonie (1859–1943), along with some surprising data about the number of impecunious English peers who in the 19th century looked for relief across the Atlantic to fresh young faces with fresh new dollars. Jennie, Clara, and Leonie were the daughters of Wall Street speculator Leonard Jerome, who made and lost more than one fortune. As the mother of Winston Churchill, Jennie is the best known to history, but her sisters lived aristocratic lives as well, though all three had frightening brushes with bankruptcy and ostracism. Kehoe follows their individual trajectories from birth, youth, marriage (and sometimes remarriage), through extramarital affairs (sometimes serial) and motherhood to grandmotherhood, dotage, and death. The author undeniably did a lot of research. She visited archives, read the principals’ correspondence, and consulted many secondary sources, including memoirs and biographies. But Kehoe rarely ventures below the surface of these women’s lives—there is only the barest discussion, for example, of Jennie’s venture into intellectual journalism with the Anglo-Saxon Review—focusing instead on what they wore at the wedding and whom in addition to their husbands they bedded. She makes sure to tell us what those many lovers wore too. When Kehoe wishes to employ a metaphor, she rarely reaches farther than the readiest cliché (a list of them all would be formidable).
Opting consistently for romance and fashion instead of analysis and criticism, this would fit well in the Harlequin Historicals series. (16 pp. b&w and color illustrations, not seen)Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-87113-924-3
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2004
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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