Obviously modeled on Simon Winchester’s The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the...
Freelance journalist Kendall does his best to jazz up the quiet life of the English polymath who turned finding the right word into a science.
Peter Mark Roget (1779–1869) lost his father when he was four years old, and his mother soon began to display signs of the mental instability that afflicted many of her relatives. Growing up with an anxious, smothering parent, Roget took early refuge in notebooks filled with diagrams, mathematical drawings and word lists. As Kendall too often reminds us, these feats of classification “insulated him from his turbulent emotions.” He studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh and became the protégé of such distinguished elders as Sir Humphry Davy and Jeremy Bentham. Though his first “Collection of English Synonyms classified and arranged” was written in 1805, the pioneering system he devised for organizing words under general, abstract concepts (“Sensation” or “Intellect,” for example) would not be published under the name “thesaurus” until 1852. Meanwhile, Roget settled in London, became a member of the Royal Society, wrote scientific articles and an esteemed treatise on physiology and enjoyed life as an eligible bachelor until marrying an affectionate, considerably younger woman in 1824. Kendall, apparently worried about maintaining reader interest during the long run-up to the publication of the Thesaurus, sprinkles his account with direct dialogue (“ ‘Dr. Roget, I’m so glad to see you,’ gushed the petite poetess”) and set pieces of dubious relevance (the Duke of Wellington’s funeral). Presumably—there are no footnotes—the quotes are drawn from the archive of personal papers dispersed by Roget’s relatives. Together with Kendall’s lame pop-psychologizing (“without this outlet, he may well have lapsed into the madness that gripped numerous family members”), they lend a lightweight tone to the biography of a substantive intellectual figure.
Obviously modeled on Simon Winchester’s The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (1998), right down to the subtitle and the overhyped prose.Pub Date: March 13, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-399-15462-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2007
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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