Interesting reading, but Elizabeth Marsh remains in many ways an enigma.
A life whose tumultuous historical backdrop included the Seven Years War, the slave trade and globalization becomes a lens through which to view a world in motion.
Colley (History/Princeton; Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World, 2003, etc.) mingles history and biography in this account of the adventures of Elizabeth Marsh (1735–85). Born to a seafaring family in Portsmouth, England, Marsh moved to Menorca at age 19 with her parents and siblings. This was the beginning of a lifetime of audacious global exploration; she subsequently ventured out on transcontinental journeys to Morocco, Gibraltar, Rio de Janeiro, London, southern and eastern India and the Cape of Africa. In these places, Marsh bore witness to cultures and belief systems that were unfamiliar to most European women at the time. She bravely withstood months of captivity in Morocco, where she nearly became Sultan Sidi Muhammad’s slave. She wrote about these experiences from a female perspective in the first known English-language text about Morocco, despite the fact that publishing it, even privately, was potentially harmful to her reputation. Marsh’s story is unusual and inspiring, and Colley’s thorough descriptions of her travels, as well as the meticulous research and references to her journals, are compelling. However, while the book’s strength lies in its details, this is at times also its weakness. Striving to create an intersection of the public and private, the personal and the historical, the author too often shifts the focus from Marsh to write at length about other members of her family. As a result, it becomes difficult to get a sense of how Marsh feels during many of the changes and journeys in her life.
Interesting reading, but Elizabeth Marsh remains in many ways an enigma.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-375-42153-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2007
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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