The reader craves more than a polite scratch at the literary myth.
British journalist Chaney offers a spirited life of the creator of Peter Pan.
Barrie, about whom Conan Doyle noted, “There is nothing small except his body,” was born in the Scottish weaving town of Kirriemuir in 1860, the ninth child of educated Protestants. He set out to make his journalistic mark in London and immediately began to publish “Auld Licht Idylls” for the St. James Gazette and others. With friends in George Meredith and Thomas Hardy, Barrie grew into a writer with serious purpose, trying his hand at novels, and “troubled, sometimes frightened, by his constant inclination to become someone else.” Lured to the theater, he wrote successful plays such as Ibsen’s Ghost and Walker, London, and he married the star actress Mary Ansell, a union that would remain childless and end in divorce. An intimate friendship with Sylvia Llewelyn Davies, her husband Arthur and their increasing brood led to his momentous creation of Peter Pan (1904): Barrie’s perceived perfect family became the Darlings. The play made Barrie rich but rather isolated by his transatlantic success, especially after the deaths of Arthur and Sylvia. Chaney does an admirable job of chronicling Barrie’s busy goings-ons, yet does not get at the heart of the man except perhaps to note that he preferred fantasy to reality. His later years were absorbed somberly by cares for the Davies’ sons and a touching friendship with the married Lady Cynthia Asquith. Chaney briefly delves into Barrie’s significance within the golden age of British children’s literature, although unlike other great writers for children, such as Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll, he refused to acknowledge time and negotiate adulthood. While Chaney’s historical overview of Scotland at the time of the Industrial Revolution is perspicacious, her treatment of Barrie’s childhood and relationship to his mother are cursory and timid. In an endnote, the author acknowledges grudgingly that “psychoanalysis has discovered Barrie,” and cites more scathing studies.
The reader craves more than a polite scratch at the literary myth.Pub Date: July 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-312-35779-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2006
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
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
SEEN & HEARD
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