A scattered, unpretentious introduction to figures readers may be tempted to investigate further.
A gossipy history zooms in on six women who broke society's rules for their own ends.
The choice of subjects by Scott (Coke: The Biography, 2013, etc.) is eclectic at best and puzzling at worst. Disregarding chronology, he bounces freely through history, awarding some of his subjects a couple of chapters and others a single one, seemingly arbitrarily. The volume opens with Victoria Woodhull, a spiritualist and advocate of free love who announced her run for the presidency of the United States in the 19th century, long before women got the vote. The author then jumps back to the 18th century for a couple dozen pages on Mary Wollstonecraft, best known as the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women. In a chapter entitled “Holy-Rolling in Carmel Love Nest,” Scott moves on to the early-20th-century life of controversial and wildly popular preacher Aimee Semple McPherson. Coco Chanel and Edwina Mountbatten, wife to the last viceroy of India, also come in for scrutiny. Most perplexing is Scott’s inclusion of Margaret Argyll, whose sole claim to fame seems to be that she was at the center of a divorce that kept the British tabloids busy in the 1960s. The author’s technique is to compile the work of earlier biographers into a brisk, conversational survey of each subject's life, with occasional asides on such topics as nymphomania and the women of the French Revolution. He writes with verve; if he doesn't have much new to say, he says it with style, and his fascination with his subjects is infectious. Scott offers neither an introduction nor a conclusion to the volume, so readers are left to draw their own conclusions about what connections he sees between these disparate lives and why he has chosen these six rather than some other set of women.
A scattered, unpretentious introduction to figures readers may be tempted to investigate further.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-78607-193-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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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