Another winning biography from Lee. Those who love Fitzgerald’s work will tuck this book right next to her volumes.
Lee (President/Wolfson Coll., Oxford; Biography: A Very Short Introduction, 2009) devotes her considerable talents for biography to Penelope Knox Fitzgerald (1916-2000), who didn’t publish her first book until the age of 58.
The author presents the story of Fitzgerald’s initially charmed life and her days at Oxford in the wildly political 1930s, where she discovered John Ruskin and William Morris, her intellectual heroes. She was preceded at Oxford by her mother, her father, the editor of Punch, and his brothers, and that earlier generation set a standard for intellectual writing that Penelope inherited. Her husband, Desmond Fitzgerald, was equally talented but eventually drank away his career and life. For a time, the couple endured abject poverty, at one point living on an old barge in the Thames. Those two years were the subject of the Booker Prize–winning Offshore (1979), which depicted their perpetually damp home, which required a high tide to flush the toilet. That adventure ended when the boat sank with all her notes and papers. Fortunately for readers, Lee had access to the copious notes Fitzgerald made for each of her books. Even for works of pure fiction, she researched the smallest, seemingly insignificant facts. Lee’s biography will provide a vivid portrait for those who have not encountered Fitzgerald’s work and will prove immensely satisfying for her many fans. The author reproduces pieces of her subject’s writing at (occasionally too-) considerable length, but Fitzgerald’s mastery of phrasing and the beauty of her work should lead readers back to her books, particularly The Bookshop (1977), which was shortlisted for the Booker, or The Blue Flower, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1998.
Another winning biography from Lee. Those who love Fitzgerald’s work will tuck this book right next to her volumes.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-385-35234-5
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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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