Although Mary Shelley’s life was fascinating, this is not the place to learn about it. The author states clearly that he is...
Most readers know Mary as Percy Shelley’s wife and the author of Frankenstein, but many critics feel her writing deserves more attention. British scholar Williams (Romantic Poetry and Revolutionary Politics, 1989) aims to tell her story and evaluate her position in the 19th-century literary canon.
Mary was the daughter of radical William Godwin and pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft (who died giving birth to her in 1797). Godwin proved a poor father, neglecting the child who worshipped him and later on marrying a woman she grew to detest. His home teemed with intellectual activity, however, and Mary grew up surrounded by London’s literary elite. Despite her sophistication, Mary was capable of losing her head, and the arrival in 1814 of the notorious atheist and radical Percy Shelley (not yet known as a poet) bowled the girl over entirely. She and her half-sister Claire Clairmont ran off to France with him, Shelley’s abandoned wife killed herself shortly after their return, and within three weeks Percy and Mary were married. This caused a scandal, and soon the three were back in Europe. There followed six years of what can only be called a hippie existence minus birth control (but with better writing). The Shelleys plus Byron and other friends traveled, schemed to improve the lot of man, and wrote great literature. The women bore children almost continually. The adventure ended when Shelley drowned, the friends dispersed, and Mary returned to England. She spent the next 30 years writing and working to build the reputation of her husband.
Although Mary Shelley’s life was fascinating, this is not the place to learn about it. The author states clearly that he is writing a literary life, and his narrative pauses frequently for a discussion of how Mary transformed a particular episode into fiction. There are extensive summaries of her work, along with speculations as to how each reflects the era, the various literary genres, or Mary’s personal crises. Although this works as literary criticism, readers purely interested in biography should look elsewhere.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-22832-5
Page Count: 222
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2000
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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