Poetic, graceful, and full of hard-won knowledge.
A luminous memoir of an unusual life in an unlikely place.
Graves, daughter and translator of the famed poet and novelist Robert Graves, spent her early life in Majorca, where her father had installed the family in bohemian exile from England. That their romanticized getaway happened to fall under the dominion of the fascist dictator Francisco Franco seems not to have troubled Graves senior, a nominal socialist, although Lucia gives a terrifying account of her school years, a time when fierce nuns spoke of the generalissimo as if he were Christ restored to earth and instructed their pupils “that the Jews, who hated the Spaniards and were political spies and conspirators, had secret dealings with the Moors and murdered Christian children.” Undaunted, Lucia grew up to be a good cosmopolitan and democrat, keenly appreciative of the many differences that distinguish Catalonia from the Balearic Islands, and both from Castile. (In Catalonian hospitals, she writes, the dominant symbol is not the cross, as it is in Madrid, but an almond-shaped eye, borrowed from ancient Egyptian iconography.) Her portrait of the reemergence of Catalan identity after Franco’s death offers a learned insight into this proud people, while her descriptions of daily life in rural Spain will inspire nostalgia in readers who have traveled there. Those hoping for dirt on the renowned author of I, Claudius will be disappointed, however, for Robert Graves appears only in passing in these pages, a generally benevolent but always distant figure. Instead, Lucia Graves lingers on her own epiphanies as a child, and then as an adult, familiar with many cultures but wholly at home in none, “immersed in a textual world” that takes in all times and peoples.
Poetic, graceful, and full of hard-won knowledge.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2000
ISBN: 1-58243-097-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2000
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
