Published in Great Britain in 1990, this biography of novelist Violet Hunt by rookie book-author Hardwick, a former schoolteacher, lacks the substance and vivid detail of Barbara Belford's Violet of the same year. Born in 1862, growing up among the Pre-Raphaelites, flirting with Oscar Wilde and John Ruskin, Hunt began her series of scandalous affairs at age 20 and the first of her 17 forgotten novels (like White Rose of Weary Leaf) at age 32. Her friends included Henry James; her lovers, Somerset Maugham and, most notoriously, Ford Madox Ford, who wrote about their relationship in his fiction. Calling Hunt ``one of those women who led the way out of Victorian times into a new age,'' Hardwick admires the writer's ``determination not to accept a predetermined role,'' her attempts to expose the ``hypocrisies and confusion of her society,'' and the way she honestly portrays herself in fiction and in diaries. Unfortunately, leaden and imprecise writing (Hardwick apparently lacked access to certain papers) seem to keep the author from offering more than a fleshless biographical outline and hollow reassessments of Hunt's work. Relying too much on strings of quotes from Hunt's contemporaries, Hardwick rarely digs into her subject's psyche or into the lively literary milieu of the Edwardian London in which she lived. Too often, the reader is left wondering about the specifics. At one point, Hardwick says that Hunt ``was one of the few women who did not succeed in becoming [H.G.] Wells's mistress.'' Later, the author refers to Wells as one of Hunt's lovers. Belford, by comparison, clarified the facts—stating that in ``1906, while still seeing Maugham, James, and Bennett socially, Violet began a year long affair with H.G. Wells.'' Again and again, the reader looks to Belford's lively and extensively researched book to find out what exactly happened to the Hunt that contemporaries described as a ``brilliant,'' ``viperish-looking beauty.'' A thwarted attempt to rescue a vital Violet Hunt from the sidelines of literary history. Read the Belford instead. (Sixteen pages of b&w photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Dec. 15, 1991
ISBN: 0-233-98639-1
Page Count: 205
Publisher: Andre Deutsch/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1991
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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