Though the droll tone sometimes dampens the effect, her joy for life is omnipresent, and her memoir timeless in its...
A reprint of a 1937 autobiography by the stepdaughter of Robert Louis Stevenson, enhanced by an editor's introduction, explanatory footnotes and an editor's epilogue.
Born in Indianapolis in 1858, Field carried vivid memories of her childhood late into her life. Her acute memory, bolstered by her natural storytelling ability, renders a rather unexceptional childhood in Indiana and California interesting to readers more than a century later. She also discusses her first marriage and the birth of her son Austin, who would become a successful playwright. Much of the rest of the memoir is set in Hawaii and Samoa, where Field lived with family members. In 1876, when Field was 18, her mother Fanny met Robert Louis Stevenson in the French town of Grez, and Fanny and the soon-to-be-famous author married in 1880. The next year, Stevenson published his masterpiece, Treasure Island. In short order, three more beloved books would follow: Kidnapped, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Black Arrow. In 1894, the congenitally unhealthy Stevenson died at the age of 44. Though Field lived for another five decades, she ends her memoir in the year of Stevenson’s death, saying nothing of her second marriage, her mother’s death or her own considerable wealth, a portion of which came from inheritance.
Though the droll tone sometimes dampens the effect, her joy for life is omnipresent, and her memoir timeless in its unpretentious presentation of the quotidian, both in her own life and in the life of one of literature’s most beloved authors.Pub Date: April 15, 2005
ISBN: 0-944220-18-5
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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