Despite its length, a tremendously engaging work with few dull moments.
The exhaustive second volume of this definitive biography treats the admiral’s supreme command of the British Navy and the bittersweet Lady Hamilton years.
British biographer Sugden is a scholar’s dream: He provides a gracious introductory bibliographic essay on previous works about Nelson and Hamilton, includes extensive maps of significant battles and even offers such helpful extras as a diagram of an “expansion” of Merton Place, Nelson’s last home in Wimbledon. Nelson: A Dream of Glory (2004) covered Horatio’s formative years: early patronage, solid marriage to Fanny and rise in ranks over the four years of wars with the French, culminating in his fame at the battle of Cape St. Vincent. This installment opens as the gravely wounded rear admiral, having lost his right arm in the disastrous defeat at Tenerife, returns to England to convalesce in Bath with his wife and aged father. Considering that his death at the Battle of Trafalgar looms in the near distance, and that the book weighs in at over 900 pages, there is a great deal to magnify over these few years. Equally epochal were the push back of Napoleonic aggression in the Mediterranean and the explosion of Nelson’s passion for the spirited second wife of elderly Lord William Hamilton. Having gained heroic stature for destroying the French fleet at the Battle of the Nile in 1798, Nelson then turned to repulse Napoleon's forces from the Kingdom of Naples, before lingering rather too long there among the lotus-eaters, to the detriment of his reputation and marriage. Sugden judges sexy Emma harshly in comparison to saintly Fanny, while Nelson is portrayed as a veritable cauldron of conflicting emotions (vanity, humility, honor, guilt), a man who yearned to do his duty yet craved a bit of happiness, too.
Despite its length, a tremendously engaging work with few dull moments.Pub Date: June 11, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8050-7807-7
Page Count: 944
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
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
PERSPECTIVES
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
