Fascinating and useful, but exceedingly recherché.
A microscopic look at the staid Victorian biographer and pupil of Thomas Carlyle, by novelist and 19th-century scholar Markus (Across an Untried Sea, 2000, etc.).
Drawing on reams of material regarding the long life of J.A. Froude (1818–94), the author fails to extract its essence for the general reader. As a young man, Froude was a Tractarian, a member of the Oxford Movement, founded by his brother Hurrell and John Henry Newman, which sought to purge Protestant elements from the Church of England. But he grew disillusioned as the movement’s leaders were subsumed into Roman Catholicism. In 1849 Froude wrote The Nemesis of Faith, a scandalous novel about a clergyman who doubts his calling; its publication cost him his Oxford fellowship. Excoriated ceaselessly by his father, a Devonshire archdeacon who believed he was profligate and professionally useless, Froude embarked on a literary career. He edited the influential review Fraser’s and forged a name as the distinguished biographer of Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, Benjamin Disraeli and, most importantly, Scottish historian, essayist and “seer” Thomas Carlyle. Falling under the spell of Carlyle and his fierce, intelligent, long-suffering wife, Jane, changed the course of Froude’s life. Carlyle convinced Froude that biography was “the only history”; he also, after Jane’s sudden death in 1866, confided to his friend that their 40-year marriage had been sexless. When Carlyle himself died in 1881, Froude honored a promise and published both Thomas’s frank Reminiscence of his wife and Jane’s unexpurgated letters. These blunt portraits of a difficult marriage brought Froude condemnation within the literary world. Undaunted, he went on to write several magisterial volumes on Carlyle’s life and to travel the globe as an unofficial diplomat; he was even reinstated at Oxford in the last years of his life. Markus’s depictions of the harsh treatment young Froude received from his sadistic family and of his sticky relationship with the Carlyles are most interesting, but her text grows cumbersome and disorganized under the weight of so much research material.
Fascinating and useful, but exceedingly recherché.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-4555-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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