With no new ground to break in either personal life or historical context, Alldritt's perspective on Yeats as ``calculating dreamer'' and ``clubman'' is fairly mundane. Faced with William Butler Yeats's astonishingly varied career and equally varied literary output, many Yeats biographers like Alldritt (English/Univ. of British Columbia) rush their narratives through his long and productive life. Typically, their biographic jeweler's loops focus on only a few facets: Yeats the Anglo-Irish London journalist, the Gaelic League member, the semi-decadent associate of the Rhymers' Club, the bard of the Celtic Twilight, the dynamo of the Abbey Theater, etc. Alldritt's book also comes just after R.F. Fosters's fact-packed first volume of his life of Yeats (p. 192), which authoritatively details the poet's involvement with various movements for Irish nationalism—Charles Stewart Parnell's home rule bid, Standish O'Grady's revival of Irish culture, and John O'Leary's Young Ireland organization—all matters that Alldritt has less success in untangling. Even Alldritt's ancillary project—to place Yeats in the rise of cultural nationalism all over Europe—falls unfortunately flat (an unconvincing parallel with Sibelius and Finland is a case in point). He has a generally better command of the literary eras Yeats spanned, and he convincingly stresses Yeats's links to French literature, and the Symbolist school in particular, through his visits to Paris and the early influence of Villers de l'Isle-Adam's famous Symbolist drama, Axel's Castle, and his play, The Shadowy Waters. Disappointingly, the drama of Yeats's life, featuring such remarkable cast members as his father, John Butler Yeats, Maud Gonne, Lady Augusta Gregory, and Ezra Pound, gets less than enthralling treatment. A passable summary of Yeats's multifaceted life, but superseded before it hits the shelves. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: June 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-517-79989-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1997
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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