Especially recommended for readers who enjoy historical context with their great books.
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 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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