Refreshingly, the author rarely complains or brags, creating an honest portrait of a privileged upbringing.
A memoir from the granddaughter of the founder of the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Biddle (The Whitney Women and the Museum They Made: A Family Memoir, 2017), who served as the president of the Whitney from 1977 to 1995, writes about how her grandmother Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875-1942) founded the Whitney and how her descendants, including the author, continue to serve on its board. As Biddle shows, in families of wealth, it was accepted that children were turned over to nannies, governesses, and servants while parents were often absent in body and mind. The formality her parents exhibited toward her and her siblings left her seeking more meaningful human contact, which she found in a kind nursery attendant, a teacher, and her riding instructor, among others. She never smiled in childhood photos, was frightened to disobey, and was under constant supervision. Though she had security and comfort, the author was taught to mask feelings of sadness, boredom, and the constant loneliness she mentions throughout the book. “School” was just a few children on the grounds of Joye Cottage in Aiken, South Carolina, where most of her childhood was spent. “It was my first nest,” she writes, “and the one that means the most to me in a long life; a touchstone, origin and symbol of that part of me that is deep inside.” Biddle writes fondly of days spent fishing and hunting, activities that she was occasionally able to enjoy with her parents. When summering in France, the family spoke only French, receiving a fine if they spoke English. Dotted throughout the narrative are intriguing tidbits about life among the ultrawealthy—e.g., the artist who painted her portrait in 1938 “would later be painting President Roosevelt at the time he died.”
Refreshingly, the author rarely complains or brags, creating an honest portrait of a privileged upbringing.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-948924-00-9
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
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
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
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