An elegant, pleasantly obsessive study of a “life of tolerance, humour, serenity and untiring curiosity.”
A biography of the peerless 17th-century English writer and scientist that finds new relevance in his deeply observant, encyclopedic writings about man and nature.
Living in the same county as his subject, physician and philosopher Thomas Browne (1605-1682), English science writer Aldersey-Williams (Anatomies: A Cultural History of the Human Body, 2013, etc.) became fascinated by Browne’s poise on the cusp of the modern, while still “happily in thrall to the ancient world and its mysteries.” His study of Browne’s work attempts to bring his subject back to engage current disputes about the place of religion in science, how to recognize and dispel “vulgar beliefs,” and how to face death. (Indeed, there is an imagined, somewhat corny interview between Browne and the author.) Browne’s sentences, borne of careful deliberation, natural observation, and personal confession, are masterpieces in themselves. They gained the admiration of an elite cadre of writers, such as Herman Melville (whose chapter on “Cetology” from Moby-Dick owes a great debt to Browne’s best-known opus Pseudodoxia Epidemica), Jorge Luis Borges, and W.G. Sebald (Aldersey-Williams’ ambulatory digressions, punctuated with curious photographs, are distinctly Sebald-ian). While Browne’s scientific work, steeped in the ancient writers, was too mysterious or wacky to be considered modern-day science (exceptions were his discovery of “Morgellons” disease and his obsession with the quincunx form in nature), his explorations of plants and animals produced all kinds of discoveries and, most importantly, words. Browne coined nearly 800 new words, which essentially opened a whole new way of speaking about the natural world—e.g., “electricity,” “medical,” “amphibious,” “incontrovertible,” and “ferocious.” In reintroducing this singular thinker and writer, which Aldersey-Williams calls his “obsession,” the author finds fresh insight.
An elegant, pleasantly obsessive study of a “life of tolerance, humour, serenity and untiring curiosity.”Pub Date: June 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-393-24164-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
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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