An unconvincing attempt to rehabilitate Reverend Patrick Brontâ and son Branwell at the expense of Branwell's famous sisters, Charlotte and Emily. Previous biographies have depicted Reverend Brontâ (17771861) as a remote Victorian patriarch and Branwell (181748) as a dissolute wastrel who squandered the family's scant resources while his talented sisters toiled as governesses. Barker, a former curator of the Brontâ Parsonage Museum in England, strives to show Patrick as a concerned father and Branwell as a gifted artist who had no more financial backing for his training than his siblings received. Although the author succeeds in somewhat softening our impression of Reverend Brontâ, nothing she writes in Branwell's defense can negate the fact that he produced little and died young from drink. Nor do her unsympathetic portraits of Charlotte (181655) as bossy and sarcastic, and of Emily (181848) as a psychological cripple, reveal any traits that have not been addressed in more balanced fashion by modern biographers such as Winnifred GÇrin and Margot Peters. The author's attempts to build up youngest sister Anne (182049) as Charlotte's literary equal are embarrassing; it is typical of Barker's lack of critical perspective that she devotes endless pages to the Brontâs' artistically negligible juvenilia and hardly any to Charlotte's key works (the groundbreaking bestseller Jane Eyre and the mordantly brilliant Villette) or to Emily's lonely masterpiece, Wuthering Heights. The ``wealth of material . . . never before used'' that she claims to have uncovered consists mostly of contemporary newspaper articles employed to give excessively detailed accounts of Patrick's local activities and a few recently discovered letters that add nothing of significance to the well-known story of the siblings' isolated lives on the Yorkshire moors and tragically early deaths. Carping over such trifles as whether Reverend Brontâ really gave his children only vegetarian meals does not constitute a valuable new perspective on a much profiled family. Peculiar, even by the often weird standards of Brontâ scholarship.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-312-13445-2
Page Count: 1004
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
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
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