Meticulously researched, but with limited audience appeal.
A detailed, yet sometimes-plodding study of the life and work of Georgette Heyer (1902–1974), the best-selling British Regency romance writer.
Kloester (Georgette Heyer’s Regency World, 2005) spent 10 years researching this book, which draws from "new and untapped archives of [Heyer's] letters,” as well as the author's notebooks and other private papers. The result is a carefully crafted, narrowly focused biography that concentrates on Heyer and her novels to the near exclusion of the times in which she was writing. The woman whom the Daily Telegraph called the "20th Century Jane Austen” was "born an Edwardian.” But Kloester points out that Heyer's upper-middle-class world and many of the traditions that informed it—“servants, horses and carriages, good manners, correct speech, the right clothing and a certain level of education and cultural literacy”—were products of the English Regency. Encouraged from an early age by her literature-loving father to read widely and write, Heyer produced her first novel when she was just 17. However, it would be more than 20 years before she would focus exclusively on the Regency romances for which she is best remembered. Until that time, she dabbled in historical, contemporary and detective fiction writing and experienced modest, but steadily increasing, success with each novel she published. After her father died in 1925, Heyer supported her mother and two brothers on her literary earnings. Until her husband could practice as an attorney, she had to support her own household as well, factors that Kloester believes contributed to her all-consuming drive to write. Heyer produced more than 50 novels in her lifetime, in addition to numerous short stories. Unable to see her work as being on par with "serious" writers, she would assert that her books sold because they were historical romances "that [didn't] date.” But as Kloester observes, the literary legacy Heyer could not fully own still "endures.”
Meticulously researched, but with limited audience appeal.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4022-7175-5
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2012
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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