Conscientious chronologies, bibliographies, and checklists of detective-hero trivia round out a survey as cozy as any of its...
Everything you ever wanted to know about the lives of the leading women of mystery—though precious little about the books they wrote.
Eschewing “academic footnotes [and] feminist folderol” from the outset, DuBose, who owns a marketing and research firm, produces substantial, readable, derivative summaries of the memoirs and published letters and interviews of Anna Katharine Green, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Josephine Tey, and Margery Allingham—and briefer overviews of such recent luminaries as Patricia Highsmith, P.D. James, and Ruth Rendell. The subjects she champions emerge as surprisingly alike in their independence, their early sense of their writing vocation, and their frequent use of mystery fiction to support deeper interests like Rinehart’s family and Marsh’s theatricals. But DuBose’s decision to turn her back on the higher criticism carries a heavy price: there’s very little criticism of any sort here, except of the authors’ husbands (who with a few notable exceptions come across as a sorry lot). DuBose devotes a good deal of attention to what made her heroines write, much less to what made them write the particular books they did, so that each of their careers, except for the variables of autobiographical elements and popular success, sounds remarkably homogeneous. The longest chapters plod indiscriminatingly through biographical territory diehard fans will already know; the capsule summaries of Mary Higgins Clark and Anne Perry are little more than extended blurbs. DuBose is weakest on James and Rendell, writers whose work cries out for more thoughtful analysis, and strongest on Tey and Allingham, offering passing comments (“In the gentlest possible manner . . . Miss Pym Disposes is an angry book”) that shed more light on their novels than reams of biography.
Conscientious chronologies, bibliographies, and checklists of detective-hero trivia round out a survey as cozy as any of its subjects.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-20942-8
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 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
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