Freelance writer Byrne captures little of Frieda von Richthofen Lawrence's unconventional vitality, her independent mind, or her tempestuous marriage with D.H. Frieda, equally careless of her reputations as Lawrence's muse, earth goddess, and obtuse nymphomaniac, never inspired tepid opinions, whether in Lawrence's portraits of her in his novels or in the recent spate of Lawrenciana. The second of three sisters in a minor Junker family, Frieda (18791956) grew up in the militarized Alsace-Lorraine, but after a hasty marriage to an older English professor of etymology, she showed a restlessness and curiosity that led to her involvement in Germany's turn-of-the- century cultural turmoil. Her first important affair—the intellectual aspect of which Byrne neglects—was with a cocaine-addicted psychoanalyst. Her second, which ended her marriage and separated her from her children, was with one of her husband's former students: the then-unknown Lawrence. Byrne skims the early period of the couple's intellectual and passionate attraction during Lawrence's first successes, which Frieda greatly influenced, and her depiction of their fraught later years (punctuated by regular, crockery-shattering fights) dismisses Lawrence's works as though Byrne is aping Frieda's anti-intellectualism. Despite Frieda's frequent disagreements with his ideas of love, sex, and femininity (and her casual infidelities), the spouses remained mutually attracted over 16 years and three continents. Byrne relies superficially on Frieda's compassion and Lawrence's emotional dependency to explain their marital endurance; her simultaneously simplistic and paradoxical portrait of Lawrence as a repressed but outright homosexual only confuses the issue. Compared to Brenda Maddox's insightful D.H. Lawrence: The Story of a Marriage (1994), Byrne's biography treats Frieda as a lumpen aristocrat stuck obstinately in a mismatch made in Purgatory. A portrait of Frieda that comprehends all of her life's events and none of her spirit. (16 pages b&w illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: May 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-06-019001-9
Page Count: 512
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
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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