Kelly’s immersion in the Casanova story pays off handsomely.
British biographer and cultural correspondent Kelly (Beau Brummell, 2006, etc.) fleshes out the complex 18th-century Venetian—principally known and caricatured as a serial seducer—as a significant intellectual chronicler of his age.
No biographer who takes on Giacomo Casanova (1725–1798) can avoid covering the vast amount of boudoir and biological specifics the subject was only too eager to document. Kelly does not shrink from the task, but he consistently strives to put these aspects of Casanova’s character within a larger context. Not just a great lover, but a writer, diplomat and philosopher, Casanova authored more than 40 books. Certainly, the man got around as did few in his time, and rubbed shoulders (and thighs) with the great and near great. His keen eye for their mores, predilections, virtues and vices resulted in a unique cultural record of an era that the French Revolution would bring violently to a close. Noting that he undoubtedly had friends as well as lovers who went to the guillotine during the Terror, Kelly notes, “In this new testament for the modern world, Giacomo Casanova cast himself as messiah and lead actor, lover, sex-god and principal protagonist but also as lead fall-guy, comedian, fraudster, grifter and dupe.” Born to a popular actress (and probably not fathered by her husband), Casanova grew to need the rich and the titled because he was neither, yet he always felt destined for the undeserved lifestyle he largely enjoyed. Kelly acknowledges the inaccuracies and exaggerations that populate Casanova’s memoirs—thousands of extant manuscript pages were not sorted and published in French (the language he chose to write in) until 1960. The author adds that historians eventually corroborated much that critics initially disputed.
Kelly’s immersion in the Casanova story pays off handsomely.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-58542-658-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: TarcherPerigee
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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