Erudite and scholarly and brimming with quotations—qualities that will appeal more to those who reside in academe than in...
In an impressive array of pieces—all previously published, most substantially revised—a historian examines the moral views of novelists, politicians and philosophers.
Himmelfarb (The Roads to Modernity, 2004, etc.) deals with figures who for most will range from the familiar (George Eliot, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Winston Churchill) to the barely known—or unknown (Walter Bagehot, John Buchan). Himmelfarb writes with ease about these figures, as though she has somehow integrated them into her own capaciously conservative philosophy. Sometimes the questions she asks seem trivial: Why, for example, does Dorothea marry Ladislaw? she wonders in her discussion of Middlemarch. But that question sends her to the heart of Eliot’s novel. The author praises Dickens for his moral imagination, for bringing “the poor into the forefront of the culture”—not as some sort of vague “class,” but as individuals. There are flashes of humor, too: In a discussion of Austen, Himmelfarb confesses that she preferred Clueless to the 1996 film Emma, feeling the former was “more in keeping with the spirit of the original.” The author examines, more or less rigorously, the novels written by political figures Disraeli and the aforementioned Buchan. For the latter’s efforts, she has extracted some amusing passages, but she is perhaps a bit quick to excuse his racism and anti-Semitism. There is a graceful review of Penelope Fitzgerald’s book about her relatives, the Knoxes (The Knox Brothers, 2000), concluding that it was the brothers’ “character and beliefs” that made them significant. Not all of the writing is graceful, however. Some passages—especially in her essay on Trilling—are dense with -isms, thick with literary allusions.
Erudite and scholarly and brimming with quotations—qualities that will appeal more to those who reside in academe than in Spoon River.Pub Date: April 7, 2006
ISBN: 1-56663-624-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ivan Dee/Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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