A biography for those who love Woolf, and for those who want to love her all the more by knowing her all the better.
A biography of the last decade of Virginia Woolf’s life that generously grants the reader an intimate view of her extraordinary world.
Marder (English/Univ. of Illinois) outlines a simple and honest theory of biography in his introduction, and it is a tribute to his skills as a writer and to Woolf’s life as an artist that his resulting work sings her praises clearly while not flinching from her failures. Through the past 30-plus years of feminist literary criticism, Woolf has rightly emerged as an icon of feminism, and icons tend to be rather flat and two-dimensional; Marder uncovers the human features beneath the symbol in all of Woolf’s dignity and in her (ultimately contradictory) detail. The beauty of this biography is found in its small moments: Woolf haggles with John Lehmann, the manager of the Hogarth Press; she bickers with servant Nelly Boxall; she takes a trip to Greece with art critic Roger Fry and his wife Margery; she worries over the economic crises of 1930s England and frets whether Maynard Keynes’s warnings will sound in time to avert disaster. The ups and downs of domestic life with husband Leonard are delineated with artistic precision, as are the moments with her stubborn mother-in-law. Through it all, of course, Woolf writes, and she does so brilliantly. With judicious excerpts from her diaries and letters, as well as the words of her friends, Marder creates a breathing and multi-layered vision of a genius at work. The story ends, as it must, with Woolf’s suicide in the river; the bleak ending feels not as harsh as it might because Marder has given the reader a real sense of the woman and the causes for her untimely death.
A biography for those who love Woolf, and for those who want to love her all the more by knowing her all the better.Pub Date: June 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-8014-3729-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Cornell Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2000
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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