A well-meaning biography, mired in detail. Goodwin, an independent scholar formerly with with the Unitarian Universalist Association, may win the prize for laboring longest on a biography: 40-plus years. Ironically, the book might have been more readable had she not been quite so meticulous. The subject, absorbing and worthy of study: Sarah Ripley, a Boston teacher, mother, pastor’s wife, and one of the most learned women of the 19th century. Scioness of both the Bradford and Alden families of colonial Massachusetts, Ripley was the eldest daughter of a prosperous sea captain. Her mother’s lingering illness and eventual death forced Sarah to take responsibility for several of her younger siblings, setting a pattern of domestic constancy that would enable her to raise her own children (seven of them), take in an orphaned niece, and serve as teacher and den mother to the countless boys enrolled in her husband’s boarding school. What sets Ripley apart from other women of her era is her own astonishing erudition. A true intellectual, she would parse Greek and Latin verbs by candlelight and read the great philosophers while stirring the sauce. The Emersons were her neighbors and friends (Ralph Waldo wrote her obituary, which Goodwin uses as a fitting prologue for the book). Unfortunately, the biographer focuses so intimately on the daily dramas of Ripley’s domestic life that we only rarely can glean where her story fits into the larger context of 19th-century American womanhood. In part, this is because Ripley left no published works, only letters, and eschewed public participation in such issues as abolition and women’s rights. (Her staid husband also may have curtailed her activism and public voice; he once threatened to burn her writings when she quoted Virgil.) Goodwin should resist her tendency to lose sight of the forest for the trees. (11 b&w illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 30, 1998
ISBN: 1-55553-368-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1998
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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