A sober, sympathetic profile that amply fulfills the author’s goal: “to lead readers back to [Woolf’s] work with a fresh...
Exemplary literary biography eschewing Bloomsbury gossip and psycho-sexual speculation in favor of what really matters: the English writer’s groundbreaking writing.
Woolf scholar Briggs (English/De Montfort Univ., England) makes perceptive use of diaries and letters, the memoirs of contemporaries and most importantly, the surviving drafts of each book to trace the author’s creative process from 1915, when her first novel was published, to her suicide in 1941. By doing so, Briggs reminds us of the revolutionary changes Woolf wrought on the modern novel as she sought to capture the texture of everyday experience and the way people thought, in such masterpieces as Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and The Waves. The evolution of Woolf’s critical, social and political thought over the same period is almost equally important: Books like The Common Reader, Three Guineas and, most famously, A Room of One’s Own supported her efforts to reshape fiction with trenchant analysis of gender, ethnic and class prejudices that hindered not just female writers, but anyone not from the English elite. (Woolf herself, Briggs acknowledges, could be something of a snob and an anti-Semite.) The narrative hews to the current fashion of downplaying the writer’s bouts of mental illness, or at least putting them into perspective alongside reminders of her productivity and commitment to her work. Writing was Woolf’s “real” life, Briggs demonstrates; gregarious and gossipy though she was, she valued socializing primarily as fodder for her art, and politics interested her insofar as it impinged on people’s freedom to achieve personal fulfillment. The grim final chapters, delineating the traumas endured by all Britons during the Blitz, quietly make the point that the despair that led to Woolf’s suicide was not entirely the product of individual neurosis.
A sober, sympathetic profile that amply fulfills the author’s goal: “to lead readers back to [Woolf’s] work with a fresh sense of what they might find there.”Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-15-101143-5
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2005
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
© Copyright 2026 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.
