An extraordinary portrait of a remarkable Englishwoman, a musical era, and a time gone by. The many for whom Violet Gordon Woodhouse is not a household name should read this book. A child prodigy on the piano, Woodhouse did for early music in the first half of this century what Sir Neville Mariner has done for it in the last 20 years. A harpsichordist and clavichordist of prodigious abilities, she made the performance of early composers such as Bach, Mozart, and Scarlatti her personal musical mission. Which is not to suggest that Woodhouse was some nerdy stick-in-the-mud. She was, in fact, a woman so enchanting that she convinced her husband to marry her even though she made it clear they would never have children or, for that matter, sex. She also managed to get this lovestruck soul (whom she did also love, by the way) to agree not long after their marriage to allow three other men equally besotted with her to live with them. It was an arrangement that continued, except for an interruption occasioned by WW I, for the rest of their lives. Woodhouse was equally bewitching to the female sex, serving as the love interest of a number of women, the most notable of whom were the composer Ethel Smyth and the novelist Radclyffe Hall. In between these romantic interludes, Woodhouse made the first recordings of harpsichord music, played with such luminaries as the cellist Pablo Casals, hosted salons whose guests included Picasso, Ezra Pound, and the Sitwells, and snagged the family inheritance after the butler murdered two spinster sisters to whom her father had left his millions. Deftly written by Douglas-Home, Woodhouse's great-niece and a painter, this book has all the makings of a Masterpiece Theatre hit. (32 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 15, 1997
ISBN: 1-86046-269-3
Page Count: 342
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1997
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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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