A reverential biography that presumes rather than inquires into Emerson's greatness. Richardson (Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind, not reviewed) offers a readable, well-researched account of Emerson's life journey: education at Harvard; work as a teacher, minister, lyceum lecturer, and essayist; marriages to Ellen Tucker and Lydia (renamed Lidian) Jackson; travels, notably his first trip to Europe, when he met Samuel Coleridge, Jane and Thomas Carlyle, and William Wordsworth, and his second, when the Revolutions of 1848 gave him ``an important lesson in politics''; and relationships with friends and relatives, including Mary Moody Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Bronson Alcott. Even as he lays out these relationships, however, Richardson undermines the assumption that Emerson might owe a significant debt to some of his sources by reducing all people, books, and events to things on which the Sage exercised his ``genius for skimming.'' Although the brief preface ambitiously promises a ``portrait of the whole man,'' this is a promise the book cannot meet; in fact, it merely makes more evident the portrait's intriguing lacunae. What kind of husband, for example, was the man who wrote to Lidian in August 1843, ``I wish I had never been born. I do not see how God can compensate me for this sort of existence''? Richardson observes that later in life the chronically sickly Lidian took a turn for the better, and ``as Emerson's powers and energies declined...those of Lidian revived...Emerson's decline made room for Lidian.'' Unfortunately, this glancing allusion refers to an intriguing pattern we could fully understand only if we knew more about either husband or wife or both. Worthwhile, though excessively careful not to knock any chips from the Great One's pedestal. (21 b&w illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: April 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-520-08808-5
Page Count: 680
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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