A praiseworthy if perfunctory biography of Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia, the “first woman in the world” to receive a university doctorate. Elena Cornaro was not only beautiful, brilliant, and of good family, but chaste, compassionate, generous and so dedicated to her Roman Catholic religious beliefs that she wore a monk’s habit under her elaborate silk gowns. Born in 1646, by the time she was 11 years old, she had learned Latin, Greek, French, and Spanish, and was studying art, music, philosophy, and history. She went on to become proficient in four more languages as well as mathematics, astronomy, and physics. She had also taken vows of chastity that put her in conflict with her father, who wanted her to make an advantageous marriage. They compromised: she would remain a virgin, but give up her dream of entering a convent. He continued to support her studies and frequently showed off her erudition at parties and gatherings of distinguished scholars. Elena’s academic reputation grew until she was recommended as a candidate for a degree at the University of Padua, passing her final exam when she was 30 years old. However, she had punished her health with “extreme penance,” wearing hair shirts and starving herself (a condition called “holy anorexia”), and died at 38. After many funeral honors, she was buried in a chapel in Padua, now called the Cornaro Chapel. In the US, she is venerated by a stained glass window at Vassar College. Unfortunately, very few of Elena’s own writings survived, so freelance writer and editor Guernsey tries to give dimension to Elena’s life by describing her extended family, the tutors and notables who influenced her, as well as depicting life in Venice in the late 17th century. Limited introduction to a woman who is a heroine of Vassar graduates and other women scholars. (55 b&w illustrations)
Pub Date: Sept. 15, 1999
ISBN: 1-883551-44-7
Page Count: 276
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1999
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 2025 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.
