A colorful, captivating literary companion for those visiting the island and a peek into the lives of some figures largely...
Part travelogue, part history, and part literary analysis, this book pleasantly meanders through the lives of foreigners who have, over the centuries, decamped to the little island of Capri to find sexual and artistic freedom.
Indonesia-based arts writer James (The Glamour of Strangeness: Artists and the Last Age of the Exotic, 2016, etc.) makes the convincing case that “since antiquity, Capri has been a hedonistic dreamland, a place where the rules do not apply: a Mediterranean prototype of Las Vegas.” This “limestone rock four square miles in extent,” far enough off the coast of Italy to make for dangerous travel before the 20th century, attracted Roman emperors looking for scenery, peace, and sensual pleasures. The author carefully untangles the various stories about Tiberius, portrayed by some as a “paranoid, bloodthirsty monarch, driven by perverted lust” and by others as a wise ruler in search of solitude, and settles on a middle ground between the two. After Rome, James dashes through the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a period during which a wide range of writers found their ways to Capri and started writing about each other in a kind of literary hall of mirrors. Many moved there to avoid persecution for homosexuality at home; others, to indulge in sex with children and adolescents. One of those with “a mania for young boys” was novelist Norman Douglas. Though little known now, he was the author of the bestselling South Wind, from which this book derives its title. As James roams around the island taking in mansions built by wealthy expatriates, he also examines the lives and works of lesser-known Capri novelists, such as the flamboyant Jacques d'Adelswärd-Fersen, an admirer of “trashy romantic fiction,” in whose work “nuance is easily lost amid the dense classical allusions, perfumed tropes, and extravagant homages to adolescent flesh.”
A colorful, captivating literary companion for those visiting the island and a peek into the lives of some figures largely faded from history.Pub Date: March 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-374-14276-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
