A doctor looks at symptoms afflicting writers from the Elizabethan era to the mid-20th century.
Ross, an infectious disease specialist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and professor of medicine at Harvard, is well qualified to take on this topic. He approaches his subjects chronologically, giving the book an added element of medical history, which is sometimes as interesting as the attempts to diagnose the subjects from the occasionally sketchy evidence. Shakespeare may well have suffered from syphilis, but references to it in his works aren’t necessarily proof that he did. Ross knows this, of course, and he makes a good effort to bring in other evidence. Other than specialists in literary history, most readers will find out more about these writers than they have ever known. That is especially true for the medical material. Who knew there were (reasonably) effective treatments for venereal disease during the Renaissance? The discussions of Swift’s dementia and Milton’s blindness offer windows into the social milieus in which the writers moved, as well as their rather difficult personalities. Melville and Hawthorne were friends, and Oliver Wendell Holmes treated both in his role as a physician. The role of Ezra Pound in advancing the careers of Yeats and Joyce, and several other top-rank writers, may almost excuse his support for fascism in World War II. Ross offers plenty of other surprising connections between topics. The book’s weakest points are the author’s occasional attempts to fictionalize some of his subjects’ experiences.
Especially recommended for readers who enjoy historical context with their great books.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-60076-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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