An intimate correspondence whose references to friends and acquaintances reads like a sexually explicit Who’s Who of Cambridge and Bloomsbury before WWI. Hale (English/Univ. of Guam) has undertaken the publication of Rupert Brooke’s correspondence with his friend James Strachey in an effort to correct common misconceptions caused by the withholding of information about Brooke’s personal life—including and especially his homosexuality. In short, he aims to prove that “Brooke the man was not the same as Brooke the legend.” If, as some critics assert, Brooke represented a time and a generation of Englishmen before WWI, his wide-ranging letters provide a full cast of players and the topics that occupied them. Strachey, translator of Freud’s work into English and younger brother of Lytton Strachey, knew Brooke from boyhood and later fell in love with the handsome, golden boy when the two met up at Cambridge. Both members of the exclusive Cambridge group, the Apostles, Brooke and Strachey wrote of their most intimate feelings, as well as their impressions of mutual friends. It was an illustrious group, with members such as Maynard Keynes, Duncan Grant, George Mallory, matched only in their position in British society and culture by the other subjects of these honest, cruel, and frequently funny exchanges: Bloomsbury friends Virginia and Leonard Woolf and Vanessa Bell, author Henry James, and Fabian socialist Beatrice Webb. Hale deftly guides us through the correspondence from 1905 to Brooke’s death on his way to Gallipoli. What begins as a youthful exchange between the seriously in-love Strachey and the teasing and distant Brooke gradually shifts its focus to Brooke the man and writer, as he continues to tease and torment his old friend with all manner of news about explicit sexual relations with both men and women and about his increasingly dismal view of life (and women). A lively introduction to Brooke the man and artist (Strachey, too) and the Edwardian culture from which they emerged. (24 illustrations)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-300-07004-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1998
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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