For American readers, a peek at British life upstairs as it really was.
A gossipy take on the glossy but star-crossed lives of two well-connected women who inspired writers and painters but were often lonely and unfulfilled.
Like a Merchant-Ivory movie, the story told by British food-writer Dimbleby takes place in a luxurious country house (Kiddington Hall in Oxfordshire) whose guests included royalty (the Prince of Wales), politicians (Herbert Asquith), famous writers (Henry James), and artists (Edward Burne-Jones), all making and breaking romantic attachments. It makes for an entertaining if speculative read, as the author tries to understand her great-grandmother May and great-aunt Amy. In 1873, May, the daughter of a clergyman noted for her beauty and charm, married Henry Gaskell, a wealthy former soldier. She bore him three children (Amy was the eldest), but his reclusive habits, long silences, and morose personality soon irreparably strained the marriage. May began to spend more time away from him, both abroad and in London, where she became a popular member of influential social and cultural circles. In 1892, she met pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones and became the last romantic obsession of his life. It appears that the long-married painter’s relationship with May was intense but fundamentally platonic, despite the passionate effusions in his many letters to her. He died in 1898, shortly after Amy’s marriage to a soldier. Though May enjoyed close friendships with other distinguished men and went on to do valuable work during WWI, she never quite recovered from the loss of Burne-Jones. She was hit hard again in 1910 when Amy “died of a broken heart,” as May told her grandchildren. An enigmatic beauty who inspired three novelists and was loved by many men, Amy was never able to find love herself. Restless, she traveled constantly, perhaps developing a fatal opium habit in the Orient.
For American readers, a peek at British life upstairs as it really was.Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2005
ISBN: 0-609-60999-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2004
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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