A diverse work that requires readers to have multiple personalities—historians, worshippers of wealth and royalty,...
Wake (Kleinwort Benson: The History of Two Families in Banking, 1997, etc.) delivers a multiple biography of the fortunate Caton sisters, who flourished in Maryland and abroad, mostly during the Regency period and its aftermath.
Part Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, part serious history of privileged women in the 19th century, the author’s account will evoke sundry responses—admiration, alarm, boredom, bemusement, gratitude. Wake begins in 1816 when three of the sisters—all gorgeous, rich and mysterious—arrived in London, where they quickly became fixtures on the city’s social scene. The author then returns to the sisters’ family history. They were the granddaughters of Charles Carroll, the only Roman Catholic to sign the Declaration of Independence, a man who owned vast tracts of land, managed multiple fecund investments and lived into his 90s. Son-in-law Richard Caton married into the family in 1787, siring the titular sisters. Although Wake provides a few paragraphs about the family’s slaves, she seems to excuse the owners, praising their practice of keeping slave families together and administering only occasional whippings. Throughout, she prefers words like servant to the nastier synonym, and she never deals adequately with the odious reality that these women’s busy lives rested on a foundation of profound human suffering. Wake cuts back and forth, sister to sister, relying on a rich archive of unpublished letters among them, sometimes emphasizing their financial savvy and extensive wardrobes, sometimes their misfortunes of the heart—Marianne had a decades-long “relationship” with the Duke of Wellington, though Wake cannot confirm that they…“did it.”
A diverse work that requires readers to have multiple personalities—historians, worshippers of wealth and royalty, investment bankers and fashion freaks.Pub Date: April 5, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-0761-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2011
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
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
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