Readers interested in 19th- and early-20th-century society, especially that of the upper classes, will enjoy this picture of...
Nicolson (Abdication, 2012, etc.) traces seven generations of women connected to the Sackville Wests.
Beginning with her great-great-grandmother Pepita Duran (1830-1871), the flamenco dancer known as the Star of Andalusia, and her doting, if not smothering, mother, the author follows the relationship between mothers and daughters through the generations. Once diplomat Lionel Sackville-West fell under Pepita’s spell, she rejected her mother and lived as his mistress. She adored her illegitimate children despite being ostracized from polite society, including Lionel’s. When she died in childbirth in Arcachon, near Bordeaux, the children were scattered, until Lionel needed a hostess for his posting to the United States. His daughter Victoria stepped in and was a brilliant addition, winning her way into the society surrounding the estate at Knole. She married her cousin, who would inherit the estate, and the difficult birth of Vita ended any semblance of happiness in the marriage. Vita and Harold’s marriage was as happy as it was unconventional: both had lovers of the same sex, she more than he. Her son and daughter-in-law Philippa carried on the family, and Philippa extended the nonmaternal lines that had progressed through the years. This social history and story of family relationships is also the tale of Knole, the ancestral home, and its magnetic hold on those women. In the same light is the pull of Sissinghurst, the home bought by Vita and her husband, Harold, when she was unable, as a woman, to inherit Knole. The first half of the book portrays strong, if flawed, women, while the ending is more autobiographical and, while well-written, more cathartic than interesting.
Readers interested in 19th- and early-20th-century society, especially that of the upper classes, will enjoy this picture of the privileged life, “where loyalty, respect and equality are all held in the highest regard.”Pub Date: June 14, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-374-17245-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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
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