Wollstonecraft’s egoism was the touchstone of her work. This intelligent and well-formed study offers both a clear...
A biography of the famed author and feminist, written by British academic and editor Todd (A Wollstonecraft Anthology, not reviewed).
Pushy, excitable, proud, highly imaginative, and terrifically self-assured, Wollstonecraft moved through a remarkable range of intellectual and moral positions with the determination and tenacity that marks an authentic search for truth and self-fulfillment. The author stresses the seriousness and originality of this search, carefully tracing the elements of morality, politics, sexuality, and imagination that kept reconfiguring themselves in Wollstonecraft’s views back to her experience. This canny and articulate biography also makes it clear that the mother of modern feminism was a drama queen of no mean proportions: tactless, self-absorbed, with a capacity for complaint and reproach as inexhaustible as her energy and intellectual openness. Such a figure should and does make for a lively narrative. In addition to following her rather bizarre series of love affairs, both chaste and carnal, we see Wollstonecraft as a young governess hilariously snubbing her aristocratic employer; as a radical author in revolutionary Paris watching in horror as ever more heads rolled away from the guillotine; and as a soon-to-be-abandoned woman traveling gamely in Scandinavia, baby and seasick maid in tow, competently doing business for her lover Gilbert Imlay while at the same time writing reams of needy, reproachful, and clingy letters to him. Throughout, her life was characterized by contradictory forces of pitiful dependence and self-deception on one hand and tremendous will and self-sufficiency on the other. Especially compelling in this regard is her relationship with her sisters, whom she supported, bullied, and ignored by turns, and her famously unconventional marriage to William Godwin, who kept a separate household from her.
Wollstonecraft’s egoism was the touchstone of her work. This intelligent and well-formed study offers both a clear illustration of the source and significance of that connection and an absorbing account of the extraordinary life that engendered it.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-231-12184-9
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2000
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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