Worthwhile reading for lovers of historical romance and the ever-engrossing Mitfords.
Hilton (Queens Consort: England's Medieval Queens, 2009, etc.) provides a sensationalistic, fast-paced account of the decades-long affair between the British novelist/biographer/socialite Nancy Mitford and Gaston Palewski, a colonel of the Free French Forces.
The author ably captures life for members of her protagonists' respective social strata as they cycled through rural England, London, Paris, Bilbao, Rome and Versailles in the years of and between the world wars. Hilton packs the narrative with such a dizzying array of people and places that readers will be constantly stimulated, if slightly bewildered. The author brings the notoriously viperous Mitford to life more effectively than she does the womanizing Palewski, whose romantic exploits, while recounted with admirable thoroughness, conjure only a vague impression of their executor. Perhaps this is the inevitable consequence of Mitford's greater fame. Hilton's prose is energetic and entertaining, though her speculation about Mitford's feelings at various points in her life can come across as strained. It is the duty of writers of historical nonfiction to theorize about their subjects' states of mind—a dry recitation of the facts of a person's life hardly makes for good reading. However, as Hilton acknowledges, “[Mitford's] true feelings can only be a matter of conjecture.” It seems no less presumptuous to insist that Mitford was a model of sophistication and restraint who accepted her lover's philandering with understanding and equanimity than it is to insist she was a pathetically passive victim of male faithlessness. Those who adhere rigidly to either view are probably mistaken, at least in some respects.
Worthwhile reading for lovers of historical romance and the ever-engrossing Mitfords.Pub Date: Dec. 18, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-60598-392-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2012
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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