A deft, authoritative, and engaging reappraisal of the great Victorian novelist.
Restless, tireless, and prolific, Dickens “became an adjective in his own lifetime.”
As part of Oxford’s informative Introduction series, Hartley (English/Univ. of Roehampton; Charles Dickens and the House of Fallen Women, 2008, etc.), scholar in residence at the Charles Dickens Museum, offers a brisk, acutely perceptive overview of the British writer’s life, work, and legacy. Her distillation of Dickens’ biography touches on familiar points: the lonely, poverty-stricken childhood; a brief, adolescent romance; marriage and the birth of 10 children; his affair with actress Ellen Ternan; his long career as a journalist and editor; and his catapult to fame, at the age of 24, with the serial publication of The Pickwick Papers. Besides creating biographical context, Hartley sharply examines the themes that engaged Dickens throughout his career, dominated by “his critique of the dehumanizing structures, ideologies, and bureaucracies of nineteenth-century Britain.” Because of his fame, Dickens was a sought-after speaker “in support of good causes,” which included sanitary reforms, the establishment of schools for poor children, and the improvement of conditions in workhouses and debtors prisons, something he recalled, darkly, from personal experience. He could be dismissive and cynical about those in power: “My faith in the people governing, is on the whole, infinitesimal,” he once declared. He was, said George Orwell, “certainly a subversive writer,” and Hartley calls him “a life-long radical.” She judiciously extracts passages from Dickens’ major writings—David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Hard Times, Little Dorrit, and the much-loved A Christmas Carol, to name a few—to exemplify the author’s characterizations, plots, and style. His use of cliffhanger chapter endings, Hartley writes, was a strategy necessary in serial publication, which “builds waiting and suspense into the meaning of the novel and makes them a crucial part of the reading experience.” Just as the term “Dickensian” has entered the English language, the novels have endured in popularity throughout the decades.
A deft, authoritative, and engaging reappraisal of the great Victorian novelist.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-19-878816-4
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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