The highly regarded novelist (Grendel; Jason and Medeia) is also a Middle English scholar of long standing; his biographical companion to the present volume will appear this spring. The Poetry of Chaucer, intended for a scholarly audience, attempts an ambitious and eclectic critical survey of the Chaucerian oeuvre. Like most recent interpreters, Gardner combines elements of the school which stresses Chaucer's subtle manipulation of his first-person narrators and the rival school which insists on the expressly doctrinal purposes of all medieval Christian art. In addition, Gardner convincingly argues that the 14th-century "nominalist" controversies underlie the structure of the Canterbury Tales and the House of Fame; tries to show the medieval psychology of the tripartite soul at work in character and motivation; reinterprets a great part of the Canterbury Tales in the light of contemporary anxiety over the limits of royal authority. Yet all of these excellent purposes are continually hampered by factual vagueness (as when Gardner suggests that the nominalist thinker Occam preceded Roger Bacon) and by a tendency to break down into a mass of unselective detail. For example, the attempt to link the three books of the House of Fame with the three branches of the trivium requires so many minor jugglings and qualifications that all sense of narrative proportion and continuity is lost. Unselective pun-huntings and Bible-ransackings abound, and one continually thinks of forests and trees. Does John in the Miller's Tale really have to be named after the author of the Apocalypse? Should the less polished part of the Canterbury Tales be redeemed as "intentionally bad art" or unappreciated masterpieces of irony? Quite possibly—but Gardner presents the case with very little sense of alternatives. He is a critic of important perceptions—"In his best works, Chaucer makes the play of artifice against natural voice not simply a poetic technique but a dialectic method, a means of perceiving." Yet his broader insights are dissipated when he attempts to apply them closely. For all his obvious love and learning, Gardner has failed to make his own words, as Chaucer made his, "cousin to the deed.
Pub Date: March 1, 1977
ISBN: 0809308711
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Southern Illinois Univ.
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1977
Entertaining, enlightening, and often hair-raising: a history of the development of medical and surgical treatments for coronary-artery disease. Klaidman (Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Georgetown Univ.; Health in the Headlines, 1991, etc.) looks at how the contributions of various clinicians, biomedical engineers, and entrepreneurs developed the patchwork of options used by today’s physicians. His starting point is the 16th-century anatomists who first drew the details of the heart’s structure, showing the coronary arteries (those vessels that serve the heart muscle itself). He fast-forwards to 1912, when James Herrick published an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association in which, “by careful comparison of the symptoms of living patients to those who died and were shown to have blocked arteries, [he] demonstrated that coronary artery disease was recognizable in living patients.” Klaidman’s realistic description of how Werner Forssmann was able to perform the first cardiac catheterization—on himself!—in 1929 is particularly unsettling, but as the author makes clear, he was far from the only inventor—guinea pig working in this field. After tracing the development of the heart-lung machine and, from there, bypass surgery in all its incarnations, Klaidman pays homage to numerous individual heart patients who died to pave the way to the current state of the art—many lost during procedures that would not be allowed under today’s ethical guidelines. Then he addresses what sort of temperament and training make a successful cardiac surgeon. Throughout, his narrative is illustrated with gripping clinical accounts, like that of a man who woke up to feel “my chest . . . collapsing in on me. . . . I had a pain like someone had attached a 220 electric line to my chest. . . . I thought: ‘Well, this is really interesting, it’s 6:20 a.m. and I’m having a heart attack.—” This patient’s treatment and prognosis make clear what advances in heart treatment mean in human terms. An eye-opening account, tied in to today’s reality.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-19-511279-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999
This sharp, sensible, ``angry'' book explores how four classes of disempowered Americans look to the criminal justice system to vindicate past grievances, and how the courts too often betray them. Using recent front-page criminal cases, Fletcher (Law/Columbia Univ.; Loyalty, 1992, etc.) shows how when crime victims are gays, blacks, Jews, or women, the defense counsel can exploit the prejudices of judge and jury. Fletcher explains how the preposterous ``Twinkie defense''—the argument that Dan White murdered San Francisco's gay supervisor Harvey Milk and mayor George Moscone as a result of binging on junk food—gave jurors the opportunity to avoid convicting White of murdering someone whose lifestyle they found repugnant. Similarly, the first trial in the Rodney King beating was derailed by the defense's ability to change the venue of the trial to white suburban Simi Valley, and by the prosecution's decision to forbid King to testify—he remained a symbol to the jury of drug-crazed black rage. Fletcher draws an intriguing parallel between that trial and those for the murders of Jewish nationalist Meir Kahane and scholar Yankel Rosenbaum, which were tainted by the defense's ability to stir up the anti-Semitism of minority jurors. Then, in a surprising about-face, he argues that the ability of women to exploit their status as victims has led to some erroneous convictions, most notably that of Mike Tyson, who may have been ``honestly and reasonably mistaken'' as to Desiree Washington's consent. Fletcher also argues that when minorities rallly behind crime victims from their group, they fuel the defense's ability to exploit jurors' prejudices, but this part of his argument never quite gels. The author has concrete suggestions for making our criminal justice system more just for victims and defendants: e.g., abolish changes of venue, permit the victim to question witnesses and veto plea bargains, limit the testimony of ``experts.'' His style is robust, straightforward, and notably jargon-free. For its sensitivity to the rights of victims and defendants alike, a remarkable work.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-201-62254-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Addison-Wesley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1994
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