A modest yet welcome addition to the literature surrounding the German world traveler and his extraordinary accomplishments.
A brief life of the influential scientist and explorer, the most renowned of his day.
This year marks the 250th anniversary of Alexander von Humboldt’s birth, which explains the arrival of Andrea Wulf and Lillian Melcher’s entertaining graphic book The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt (2019), building on Wulf’s earlier Invention of Nature (2015). This comparatively slender life by Times Literary Supplement editor Meinhardt adds only a little materially to the facts surrounding the explorer and polymath. What it does successfully is place him not so much in the tradition of the ongoing Enlightenment as at the vanguard of the romantic movement, blending art and science as an exaltation of the human mind. “In each part of the world,” writes the author, Humboldt “stressed, nature had its own, distinctive character, and the very thing that was singular about it eluded the power of comparison.” In other words, the world is made up of distinctive entities rather than great forces, individuals acting rather than the grinding of the Hegelian dialectic, all susceptible to sentiment and sensation but hard to describe, requiring the poet as much as the practitioner of the dawning scientific method. Small wonder that, later in life, Humboldt wrote not just of the places he saw as he traveled around the world, but also of “the moral disposition of Humanity” as he encountered it. Meinhardt also adds a little sizzle to the steak with her suggestion that Humboldt was likely not ascetic in matters corporeal, as evidenced by his attachment to a 22-year-old Ecuadorian named Carlos Montúfar: “There were rumors that the association was not merely scientific," she writes with nice circumspection. Wulf’s is the more comprehensive book, but Meinhardt delivers a useful commentary on Humboldt and his age.
A modest yet welcome addition to the literature surrounding the German world traveler and his extraordinary accomplishments.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-62919-019-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: BlueBridge
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
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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