Some Frost aficionados will undoubtedly find some delight in a text that many other readers will find soporific.
One of the poet’s granddaughters combines reminiscence with literary criticism in this memoir.
The daughter of Frost’s daughter Lesley (from whom the poet was somewhat estranged for years), Francis has spent much of her career studying and publishing about her grandfather’s work (Robert Frost: An Adventure in Poetry, 1900–1918, 2004). She includes a foreword by Frost biographer Jay Parini, a scholar whom she praises throughout. In her preface, Francis tries to explain her approach, calling the work “an interactive personal/academic memoir,” but Frost disappears for pages on end, and readers are left with numerous eye-glazing accounts of the local and international travels of the author and her family members. Francis also offers samples of her own poetry, which are not likely to cause readers to forget her grandfather’s work. She also includes a number of poems from the man she calls “RF” throughout—and from numerous other writers, as well, including John Masefield. Francis provides excerpts from her mother’s journal, sections that prove to be some of the most engaging in the book, and from various family letters, also engaging. Frost fans will find greatest interest in the accounts of his various literary friendships (from Amy Lowell to Octavio Paz), his time in England (beginning in 1912: they let a coin toss determine if they would go or not), and the New England farmhouses they occupied. Perhaps most powerfully of all, we get a clear portrait of the author’s mother, a peripatetic soul devoted to the improvement of humanity. Francis also includes a series of previously unpublished photos.
Some Frost aficionados will undoubtedly find some delight in a text that many other readers will find soporific.Pub Date: Dec. 11, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8139-3745-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Univ. of Virginia
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2015
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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