Serviceable but ultimately uninspiring.
Biographer/novelist/journalist du Plessix Gray (Them, 2005, etc.) brings her personal and professional expertise in French culture, letters, politics and history to a short biography of the celebrated liberal writer and political provocateur.
The vivacious and scholarly daughter of Jacques Necker, Louis XVI’s director general of finance, Germaine de Staël (1766–1817) gained notoriety as the flamboyant doyenne of salons she hosted in her elegant homes in pre-Revolutionary France. An early and ardent champion of women’s rights, the unhappily married Staël also enjoyed a series of sexual liaisons with a procession of suitors young and old enchanted by her wealth, charm, intelligence, candor and liberal ideals. She eventually drew the ire of Napoleon Bonaparte, who took umbrage at the progressive views she espoused in her prolific writings in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Staël’s forthright condemnation of the emperor might well have drawn harsh punishment, but she was careful to cultivate powerful protectors, including his foreign minister; Napoleon had to settle for periodically exiling her from Paris in the latter years of her life. Du Plessix Gray delivers insightful passages on Staël’s addiction to opium, noting that it was commonly used for medicinal purposes throughout Europe in the late 18th century and that the French iconoclast shared her affinity for the drug with such fellow writers as Coleridge, Baudelaire, Dickens, Poe and Keats. For all her flair and élan, Staël remains a shadowy figure here. Upstaged by her biographer’s musings on Necker, the French Revolution, her nonstop parade of lovers and the insecurities of Bonaparte, Staël never stands at the forefront of her own life story. Still, the book is likely to find an audience among devotees of French politics, literature, feminism and salon culture.
Serviceable but ultimately uninspiring.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-934633-17-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Atlas & Co.
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2008
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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