Small wonder that politicians, poets, and popes were after his head. McCalman opens the files on a fascinating character—a...
A lively bio of the once celebrated, but now little remembered, charlatan and troublemaker.
Australian humanities scholar McCalman, a learned student of the dark side of the Romantic era, has an excellent subject in the Sicilian count Alessandro di Cagliostro (1743–95), a formerly disavowed son of Palermo who has lately been honored with an alley in his name. And what better patron saint for Palermo? So asks an Italian journalist McCalman interviews. Though an “all-around flim-flam man” and “arch-deceiver,” Cagliostro had tremendous likability and undeniable charisma at his service, and with these qualities he ranged among the courts of Europe gathering acolytes and allies and expounding a weird philosophy that he called “Egyptian freemasonry,” which borrowed freely from Judaism and Islam—enough so to raise cries of heresy wherever he went. With his promises of turning base elements into gold and his habit of playing with other people’s money acquired through various exercises in faith-healing, Cagliostro got himself in trouble everywhere he went; he did time in the Bastille, incurred the considerable wrath of Catherine the Great of Russia, and wound up one of the last victims of the Roman inquisition, which saw to it that Cagliostro spent the last years of his life rotting away in prison. Cagliostro seems to have been most effective, in fact, in uniting scattered European intellectuals in a hatred of him: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, for one, despised him with a burning passion, though William Blake adored him. Though surely a cad and a quack, writes McCalman, Cagliostro was honest in his own way: he “rarely made wild claims for the chemical values of his nostrums,” insisting that any cures that came to his patients were the result of divine intervention; and he was genuine in his belief that freemasonry could bring about a reconciliation of religions and governments, and with it peace.
Small wonder that politicians, poets, and popes were after his head. McCalman opens the files on a fascinating character—a con man for the ages.Pub Date: June 6, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-000690-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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