Late-18th-century Britain comes brilliantly alive in a vibrant intellectual history.
Memorable portraits of members of a London club who met weekly to discuss literature, politics, and life.
From 1764 to 1784, a group of men met once a week in a private room at the Turk’s Head Tavern in London for conversation and, in varying degrees, camaraderie. They called themselves, simply, “The Club,” and they included some of the most prominent personalities of the time, including Edward Gibbon, Adam Smith, Joshua Reynolds, Edmund Burke, David Garrick, Oliver Goldsmith, Richard Sheridan, and, most significantly, Samuel Johnson and his acutely observant biographer James Boswell, who take center stage in this masterful collective biography. Like Jenny Uglow did in The Lunar Men (2002), Damrosch (English/Harvard Univ.; Eternity’s Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake, 2015, etc.) offers incisive portraits of individual members, highlighting their relationships and interactions with one another to reveal “the teeming, noisy, contradictory, and often violent world” they inhabited. It was a world confronting upheaval: noisy agitation in Britain’s American Colonies, bloody rebellion in France, debate over slavery, and domestic economic stress. Between 1739 and 1783, Damrosch notes, Britain was at war for 24 years, at peace for 20. In 1776, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations and Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire both spoke to national preoccupations: Smith, to inequality and the consequences of industrialization; Gibbon, to fears about maintaining the empire. Besides illuminating the salient issues of the day, Damrosch characterizes with sharp insight his many protagonists: abstemious Johnson, who likely would be diagnosed with depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder today; womanizing, hard-drinking Boswell, an unsuccessful lawyer with “unquenchable confidence,” intelligent, but “no intellectual,” whose mood swings indicate that he may have been bipolar. Although Damrosch emphasizes the men and their works, he does not neglect the women in their lives: memoirist Hester Thrale, for one, who offered Johnson “crucial emotional support” as his confidante and therapist and novelist and diarist Fanny Burney.
Late-18th-century Britain comes brilliantly alive in a vibrant intellectual history.Pub Date: March 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-300-21790-2
Page Count: 488
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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