In a biography thick with the historical and literary milieu of Marian ``George Eliot'' Evans, Karl (Franz Kafka: Representative Man, 1991, etc.) proves sensitive to the Victorian contradictions she faced as a first-rate intellect, a sensitive individual, and a plain woman. When ``George Eliot'' arrived with Scenes of Clerical Life, Marian Evans's life (181980), already two-thirds complete, was unknown to the public—a state she tried to preserve against what she called ``hard curiosity.'' Her life still holds many secrets, but Karl embarks on psychological anaylsis of her depressive personality and speculation about her private life while arguing for her as the representative Victorian voice over Dickens, Carlyle, and Ruskin, delving ably into her creative process in Adam Bede, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda. Although Karl starts strongly with her childhood in the slowly industrializing Midlands of the early Victorian era, he handles with less insight her intellectual development during her Evangelical phase and her expanding progressive education later (particularly her attachment to German culture and philosophy). Things pick up again with Evans's launching of a serious career in letters and her move to London. There she had fraught relationships with Westminster Review publisher John Chapman and future Darwinist Herbert Spencer. Karl argues that her unconventional relationships with men (the Chapman set-up was a virtual menage Ö quatre), while emotionally frustrating, allowed her to escape Victorian restrictions on women and to absorb intellectual resources before moving on. This process clicked with her lifelong companion George Lewes, who, though unable to divorce his wife, lived with Evans as a husband in what she called ``dual solitude.'' Though Karl falls short of fully comprehending Evans as an individual, his biography carefully depicts both the ceaseless intellect and the woman in one of the Victorian era's outstanding novelists. (photos, not seen)
Pub Date: June 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-393-03785-1
Page Count: 768
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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