John Burroughs (1837-1921) might have wished for more poetry in this biography by free-lance writer Renehan (The American Scholar, The Conservationist, etc.), but he couldn't have asked for a more inclusive or caring portrait. Renehan apparently worried the bones of Burroughs's voluminous journals, diaries, and correspondence for 12 years, and his thoroughness is quickly evident here. All stones are turned, starting with the strange family life the budding naturalist weathered as a youth (one episode finds his fanatically religious father filling the boy's Christmas stocking with frozen horse manure: Christmas was for penance, not frivolity), on through his various tenures as schoolteacher, gravedigger, bank auditor, grape grower, celery farmer, reformer, and lecturer; his sorry marriage to Ursula and his liaison with Clara Barrus; and his infatuations with Emerson and Whitman, and with men of wealth and power—Ford, Roosevelt, Carnegie, Edison. Threaded throughout is Burroughs's search, amidst penury and scant encouragement, for the writing style that would become his signature. Renehan's affection for Burroughs is manifest from the start, and there are moments when this sympathy drifts into idolatry. But the author doesn't gloss over Burroughs's nastier qualities—his belief in social Darwinism, his willingness to be used by notorious grandees, and his philanderings all come in for full scrutiny. More problematical is Renehan's artless recording of event after event for long stretches of the naturalist's life: Here, the prose takes on a woodenness that Burroughs wouldn't have enjoyed (``[Burroughs] would be reactive rather than proactive. He would let his future find him rather than he it''). But these low points are partially balanced by passages of real power, particularly those detailing Burroughs's final years. Renehan gives the old Burroughs-as-lovable-bewhiskered- funkster chestnut a decent burial, and, commendably, allows the man to emerge from the fog of his reputation—broad of stature but riddled naturally enough with foibles. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 15, 1992
ISBN: 0-930031-59-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1992
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.
