A first-rate synthesis of one of literary history’s most astonishing endeavors.
A spirited, learned account of how Samuel Johnson (1709–84), son of a bookseller and sheriff, created the first great English dictionary.
Hitchings organizes his debut work in a somewhat playful but effective fashion. At the head of each chapter is a word of consequence for that section (e.g., “Bookworm,” “Melancholy”), accompanied by Johnson’s original definition. And each chapter is brief—like a dictionary entry—focused on a specific topic. The author has actually crafted a dual biography (of a man, of lexicography) as well as a swift social history of mid- to late-18th-century England. We learn about Johnson’s tormenting physical difficulties—blind in one eye, partially deaf, scarred by scrofula. Not an appealing childhood playmate, young Johnson read with something near savagery and then, after acquiring some money to attend Oxford, had to withdraw after only about a year because of his father’s poor health. (Degrees were awarded him later.) Johnson eventually married an older woman (by more than 20 years), failed as a schoolteacher and—like Shakespeare, one of his heroes—set off for London to make his fortune. He worked for publishers and booksellers and was invited in 1746 by publisher Robert Dodsley to compile a new English dictionary. And in 1755, the first massive edition appeared, weighing in at more than 20 pounds. Hitchings does a masterful job of describing Johnson’s approach (which he modified as he became aware of the Herculean dimensions of his task) and of doing his best to credit his assistants, whose biographies are largely lost to history. The author also entertains in two significant ways. First, he has scoured the Johnson dictionary for enjoyable and arresting examples (Johnson included fart, but not buggery). Second, he writes many sentences the Doctor himself would have admired. “The definitions and illustrations,” notes Hitchings, “are luxuriant with these sudden blooms.” Hitchings ends with a solid assessment of Johnson’s enduring legacy.
A first-rate synthesis of one of literary history’s most astonishing endeavors.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2005
ISBN: 0-374-11302-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2005
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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