An illuminating portrait.
Parkman Prize–winner Richardson takes a vivid look at a pioneering American intellectual.
The biographer has previously tackled with aplomb such challenging thinkers as Thoreau (1995) and Emerson (1988), and here, too, the breadth and depth of his research is evident. William James (1842–1910) profoundly influenced modern philosophy and psychology, including the way these and other subjects are taught. His body of work and his life were so rich and colorful that distilling them to their essence is a daunting task. Richardson, however, strikes a careful balance between substantive fact and thoughtful commentary. He draws on James’s notebooks, diaries and published works, in addition to dozens of other sources, to accent his overview with carefully chosen quotations. This high degree of detail brings the romantic spirit of James to life in passages that convey his delight in a young woman who caught his eye, his exuberance upon first seeing the Amazon River, the humility he felt standing in the mountains at night surrounded by stars. The narrative is sometimes thrilling, sometimes arduous, much as James’s own life was slowed by illness and buoyed by love. A zealous reader from an early age, James attended Harvard Medical School as a prelude to his continuing career as a scholar. While in Cambridge, around 1871, he joined a small number of forward-thinking men who called themselves the Metaphysical Club. This group became the core of modern American intellectualism. Referring to “the sense of the amount of effort which we can put forth,” James wrote in Principles of Psychology, “He who can make none is but a shadow; he who can make much is a hero.” James accomplished much with his work, and the same can be said here of Richardson.
An illuminating portrait.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2006
ISBN: 0-618-43325-2
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2006
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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