An astutely political and compellingly chronicled life of the man the prince of Wales described as “the most extraordinary creature alive.” Sheridan, hoping to be remembered for his radical political career in Parliament, had wished to be buried in Westminster next to his Whig colleague Charles Fox; instead, the author of The School for Scandal was interred next to David Garrick, his predecessor as manager of the Drury Lane Theatre. Unlike most Sheridan biographers, who tend to concentrate on the young and witty Anglo-Irish playwright and the later rake-hell drinking companion of the prince of Wales and Lord Byron, essayist and drama critic O’Toole (The Lie of the Land: Irish Identities, 1998) draws out the true character of the radical, patriotic Irishman from the public figure that Sheridan himself so carefully manipulated. Although Sheridan rose to the highest English social circles and lived in Britain his entire adult life, his cultural origins were both Protestant and Gaelic, with a literary and comic inheritance from Swift, his father’s friend. His romantic reputation, however, was entirely his own invention, beginning with his sensational elopement with the glamorous young singer Elizabeth Linley, through the two duels he fought with a rival for her and his play The Rivals, which capitalized on the incidents. Despite his phenomenal success as a playwright and his coup in taking control of Drury Lane, Sheridan, O’Toole argues, looked to literary fame only for launching his Parliamentary career. Portraying Sheridan as the most principled yet most mercurial of the Whigs, O’Toole deftly reads into the political messages hidden in The School for Scandal, the theatricality of his famous five-and-a-half-hour oration against British imperial abuses in India, and his career-long act as an outsider on the inside, consorting alike with Irish rebels and British royalty. Byron jokingly reminded Sheridan’s first biographer that “Old Sherry” was “an Irishman and clever fellow,” qualities O’Toole never understates in this superbly sympathetic life.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-374-27931-4
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
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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