Generally fair-minded treatment of a character with an enduring hold on the popular imagination.
A new biography of the famous French astrologer, based on many original sources.
Australian historian Wilson (Before the Flood, 2002, etc.) lists himself as a nonbeliever in astrology, thus separating this book from those written by Nostradamus’s fans and apologists. Michel de Notre Dame (1503–66), son of a christianized Jewish merchant, studied medicine at the University of Montpellier, where fellow classmates included the writer Rabelais. Astrology was at the time part of the medical curriculum, believed to offer key insights into the health of patients. Nostradamus did practice medicine, visiting several Provençal towns during outbreaks of plague. But his future lay with astrology. He published annual almanacs from 1550 until the year of his death, making observations and doing calculations well in advance. These ephemeral publications (authentic copies are rare) catapulted him into international renown. His horoscopes, offering detailed predictions of marriages, offspring, illnesses, and other important life events, were soon in demand by the rich and powerful. Examining several of these, Wilson finds many discrepancies between the predictions and the actual course of the subject’s life, although he credits Nostradamus with a number of impressive hits, such as his 1558 prediction of the early demise of French king François II, who indeed died at age 16 in 1560. Wilson notes that several original horoscopes remain in private hands and urges their study to allow a better assessment of Nostradamus’s accuracy. In his own time, despite occasional complaints about his obscurity and illegible handwriting, the astrologer appears to have generally satisfied his powerful clients. More impressively, he avoided trouble with both ecclesiastical and civil authorities in an era marked by religious strife and persecution. Most surprising of all is his posthumous prominence, with new editions of his prophecies in almost every century. Wilson does a good job of describing the historical and social context from which Nostradamus emerged.
Generally fair-minded treatment of a character with an enduring hold on the popular imagination.Pub Date: Dec. 18, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-31790-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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