An insightful peek into a time long gone, told with skill, humor and wit.
The no-nonsense follow-up to Below Stairs: A Classic Kitchen Maid’s Memoir that Inspired Upstairs, Downstairs and Downton Abbey (2012).
In this latest book, which was originally published in Britain more than 30 years ago, the author explores the ramifications of what was then considered a shocking event in the class-bound culture of early-20th-century Britain. Rose, the fetching under-parlourmaid to the wealthy Wardham family, did the unthinkable, eloping with Gerald, the family’s only son. Powell deftly explores the reactions of the family—Gerald’s father refused to see the couple ever—as well as those of the servants below the stairs, who seemed as disconcerted as the family. Though Powell and another young servant were delighted with the change in status the romance afforded Rose, she understood the hazards as well. “She couldn’t see that she’d never really be one of them; she’d never be able to keep up the conversation at dinner for she never read, not even novels, and knew absolutely nothing about politics or the arts,” she writes. Throughout the narrative, Powell offers insights illuminating the life and times for house servants following World War I, including the strict hierarchy among those who spent their lives working for wealthy families. She also looks at the sexual mores of the times, the incredible meals created by armies of servants toiling in the basements of the big houses and her own ideas regarding her own marriage. “I was determined to marry and achieve an equal partnership,” she writes. “Although I would probably still have little money, I intended to have, in my marriage, as much freedom as the male had always had by inalienable right.”
An insightful peek into a time long gone, told with skill, humor and wit.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-02929-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2013
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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