A vivid, shrewd, and above all engrossing exploration of Friedrich Nietzsche's last works and days in Switzerland and Italy. Nietzsche's life as a writer began in the early 1870s and lasted only until 1888. In that final year the long-term effects of syphilis and perhaps an inherited neurological condition robbed him of his faculties, leaving him demented, then physically incapacitated and completely dependent on his unscrupulous sister until his death in 1900. Much of this last productive year was spent in the Piedmontese city of Turin, where Nietzsche lived frugally as a lodger in the home of an Italian family. Eventually, he collapsed in the street. Chamberlain—a British journalist, contributor to the Times Literary Supplement, and author of several books, of which this is the first to appear in the US—takes for her theme this painful last year. Her book is part biography, for it looks at the philosopher's intimate personal life—his preoccupation with the Wagners, his sexual failures and frustrations, his money worries and loneliness, even his close attention to diet—and part cool intellectual inquiry. She offers thoughtful and often original commentary on the four books that Nietzsche wrote during 1888 (among them Ecce Homo and Twilight of the Idols) and deftly interweaves his philosophical with his personal concerns. But above all, Chamberlain offers a tightly focused and elegantly written book whose prose style itself reflects and embodies Nietzsche's own views about the interpenetration of language and thinking. It is a significant accomplishment. Just when you thought Nietzsche had been swallowed whole by academe, along comes a writer who returns him to the public life of the mind. It is an event to be savored.
Pub Date: Jan. 30, 1998
ISBN: 0-312-18145-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1997
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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