A well-wrought life of an eminent Victorian who merits our broader acquaintance.
“They dined on mince, and slices of quince, Which they ate with a runcible spoon”: spirited biography of the often dispirited master of the nonsense rhyme.
Remembered mostly as a writer of limericks, a poetic form he made his own, and other frivolities, Edward Lear (1812-1888) had a much broader range: In the Victorian era, ushered in when he was still a teenager, he was widely regarded as an illustrator and, moreover, as a scientific illustrator with a particular gift for painting birds. According to British biographer and historian Uglow (In These Times: Living in Britain Through Napoleon’s Wars, 1793-1815, 2015, etc.), he was also “an intelligent, self-aware depressive” who battled the black dog of melancholy during his long and productive life. Depression aside, Lear was the kind of man who threw himself into projects: He knew everyone who was anyone, teaming up with Tennyson for adventures and working off a considerable head of steam by writing. “Nonsense is the breath of my nostrils,” Lear confessed, but he was capable of much considerable seriousness as well. Throughout the book, Uglow turns up wonderful moments, as when Lear set to work contributing to the “great visual filing system” devised for a scientific collection assembled by the retiring Lord Derby and when he met with Queen Victoria a few times in order to teach her, at her request, how to draw: “A diligent pupil, she copied Lear’s drawing and he, hardly surprisingly, was pleased and encouraging.” Apart from the workhorse Uglow chronicles, Lear was also a peripatetic man of broad interests who seemed, at least outwardly, cheerful. He was, in short, a Victorian man of many parts: a scientist, artist, writer, and spiritual searcher who struggled to overcome what, in one of his “darkest negatives,” he called the condition of being “blank.”
A well-wrought life of an eminent Victorian who merits our broader acquaintance.Pub Date: April 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-374-11333-9
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
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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