Finally, a superb and balanced biography of the enigmatic American religious leader. Independent historian Gill (with a doctorate from Cambridge; Agatha Christie: The Woman and Her Mysteries, not reviewed) spent years in legal negotiations with the Christian Science Church, trying to gain access to Mrs. Eddy’s voluminous correspondence. Her effort paid off: This is the best study to date of Eddy, surpassing other biographies which sought merely to debunk her as a charlatan and hysteric. Gill offers a scholar’s concern for placing Mrs. Eddy in the context of 19th-century American women’s history. She claims that Eddy has been misunderstood in part because she subverted the well-worn pattern of Victorian female life: —She was conventional in her twenties . . . [and] weak in her thirties, but indefatigably working in her sixties, famous in her seventies, [and] formidable in her eighties.— Excessively shrewd in her business dealings and distant from her only son, Mrs. Eddy embodied qualities usually assigned to Victorian men. And Gill’s portrait of her is hardly all sweetness and light. She discusses Mrs. Eddy’s almost cruel dealings with some of her closest disciples, her increasing paranoia as a superannuated recluse, and her tendencies to —borrow— (plagiarize) ideas from mentors like Phineas Quimby. Even so, Mrs. Eddy emerges from Gill’s warts-and-all treatment as a transcendent and powerful figure worthy of respect from the most ultra-orthodox Christian Scientist. If there’s any flaw here, it’s that Gill could have done more to explore19th-century religion. For example, she quotes from a letter in which the young Mary wrote of her adherence to a strict Grahamite diet. Gill never explains the origins or trendiness of Graham’s reforms, and assumes (probably wrongly) that the adolescent Mary was a borderline anorexic. In all, though, a genuine achievement.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-7382-0042-5
Page Count: 752
Publisher: Perseus
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1998
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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