The prose is workmanlike, but Ardizzone (American Studies/Notre Dame) makes an important contribution by bringing Greene’s...
Thorough biography of the intriguing woman who organized financier J.P. Morgan’s rare books and illuminated manuscripts.
Born in 1879 in Washington, D.C., Greene hailed from a genteel lineage of free African-Americans; in 1870, her father, Richard Greener, was the first black man to graduate from Harvard. Beautiful and dusky-skinned, she had passed since childhood as white (a subject also explored by Ardizzone and co-author Earl Lewis in Love on Trial, 2001). Greene had a scant three years’ experience at the Princeton University Library when she was referred to Morgan by his nephew Junius in 1906. She was not intimidated by the gruff ways of her famous employer, who charged her with making his new library preeminent. With Greene’s help, he would make spectacular purchases, such as a William Caxton edition of Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d'Arthur, and in no time she was enjoying invitations and European travel among the wealthy. In this high milieu, she met and fell in love with art critic Bernard Berenson (advisor to Morgan’s rival, collector Isabella Stewart Gardner), with whom she carried on a decades-long affair tacitly approved by his wife, Mary. Though Greene encouraged many other flirtations and affairs over the years, she never married, and she supported her mother and sisters her whole life. She inherited $50,000 when Morgan died in 1913, but continued in her role at the library under son Jack Morgan. He realized Greene’s dream of making the collection accessible to everyone by incorporating the library as a public institution in 1923 and naming her director. She retired in 1948 due to ill health, but continued to be a powerful force in the New York art world until her death two years later.
The prose is workmanlike, but Ardizzone (American Studies/Notre Dame) makes an important contribution by bringing Greene’s little-known, culturally significant work to light.Pub Date: June 4, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-393-05104-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2007
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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