Some intriguing historical tidbits, delivered with gushing language and a gossipy tone.
Freewheeling biography of a racy Georgian demimondaine.
Manning (Seducing Mr. Heywood, etc., not reviewed) was inspired to delve more deeply into the life of divorcée Grace Elliott (1754–1823) after seeing Eric Rohmer’s film The Lady and the Duke, based on the Englishwoman’s posthumously published memoir of surviving the Reign of Terror in Paris. Well, perhaps “delve” is not quite the verb that springs to mind when the result is a text notable for its breathless prose and fawning treatment of British aristocracy. Born Grace Dalrymple in Edinburgh, Elliott was educated in a continental boarding school and married off at age 17 to an odious social-climbing doctor half her height and twice her age. She cuckolded John Eliot fairly quickly, thanks to her alluring beauty and the attentions of debauched gallant Lord Valentia. And she made an equally swift passage from shunned divorcé to fashionable lady (subject of several remarkable Gainsborough portraits) in both London and Paris. Lord Cholmondeley was her patron for several years, followed by Philippe, duc d’Orléans, the richest man in France, and then the Prince of Wales. Prinny, as the future George IV was known, may or may not have sired Elliott’s daughter Georgiana, but he ensured the girl’s care for the rest of her life. The intrepid Englishwoman’s finest hour occurred during the French Revolution. Openly loyalist, she probably smuggled letters for Marie-Antoinette. She was imprisoned and nearly guillotined for consorting with the turncoat Orléans. Manning exuberantly accompanies her account of these personages and their high-jinks with numerous, gleeful sidebars about topics such as birth control methods, scandal-mongering newspapers, the ascension of Madame Guillotine and the pronunciation of British upper-class names. My Lady will appeal to amateur historians and loyal followers of the current Prince Charles, to whom the author refers frequently.
Some intriguing historical tidbits, delivered with gushing language and a gossipy tone.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-6262-X
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2005
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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