Impeccable scholarship, though it lacks Petrine panache. (16 illustrations and map, not seen)
Biography of the tsar who aimed the Russian head, if not the heart, westward.
Following up on Russia in the Age of Peter the Great (1998), Hughes (History/University Coll., London) returns to familiar terrain with a new focus: the life of the man who dominated the vast Russian stage from the time he inherited the throne at age ten until his death in 1725. Born in 1672 into a huge family (16 children), Peter grew up in a country far more primitive than the one he would bequeath. Russia had no schools or universities; 90% of the population belonged to the peasant class. Hughes characterizes Peter as striking in many ways. He was large (over six-and-a-half feet), curious, energetic, willful, practical, and organized—qualities he would retain until his dying days. He loved food, drink, practical jokes. He escaped from a passionless arranged marriage by packing his protesting wife off to a convent, then married the redoubtable Catherine, who would reign after his death. Although Hughes recognizes and emphasizes Peter’s accomplishments, she does not conceal his flaws and cruelty. Opponents were tortured, beaten, executed. Near the end of his life, he beheaded one of Catherine’s rumored lovers and presented her the capital relic preserved in a jar. Adhering principally to documentary evidence, Hughes takes us along with Peter as he attempts to revolutionize his country’s fashions (he favored German clothing), educational system, governmental bureaucracy, inheritance laws, and religion (he made certain the church remained subservient to the state). She also shows us Peter’s abiding passion for sailing and lets us see the tsar dressed as a Dutch shipbuilder learning all he can from the masters of the sea in the Netherlands. Another passion—never realized—was to eliminate corruption in the ruling classes. Hughes notes that virtually all of Peter’s specific initiatives are long gone, but he did make Russia a great world power.
Impeccable scholarship, though it lacks Petrine panache. (16 illustrations and map, not seen)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-300-09426-4
Page Count: 290
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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
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