Former Reuters journalist Gabriel (The Art of Acquiring: A Portrait of Etta and Claribel Cone, 2002, etc.) offers a rich, humanizing portrait of the Marx family.
The author strives mightily—and largely succeeds—in maintaining balance and perspective in her view of Karl and Jenny Marx and their family, long demonized by the Right and sanctified by the Left. Gabriel begins in 1851; the exiled Marxes were in London, enduring penury and near starvation as Karl struggled to do the research and writing that would later culminate in Das Kapital, the multi-volume work completed by his longtime friend, collaborator and patron, Friedrich Engels. Gabriel writes most enthusiastically about Marx’s wife, Jenny, a brilliant and lovely woman from a moneyed family who married Marx, uncomplainingly endured their decades of poverty, never lost faith in the significance of her husband and his work, delivered his children (some of whom died in childhood) and lived to see his work begin to achieve the recognition she had always believed it deserved. The author relies heavily on the massive Marx family correspondence to help her bring to life these most remarkable people. The three daughters who survived into adulthood were all highly intelligent, accomplished and unlucky in love. The author can barely restrain her disdain for Edward Aveling, the philandering (married) man who persuaded young Eleanor Marx to live with him, then betrayed and abandoned her. Her suicide followed not long after. Later, her older sister Laura would also took her own life. Gabriel gracefully achieves an impressive, challenging agenda: the joint biographies of the Marxes (parents, daughters), the career of Engels, the rise of socialism and organized labor, the theoretical background of Marxian economics and politics and the historical and economic contexts for all. A saga as richly realized as a fine Victorian novel.
Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-316-06611-2
Page Count: 768
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2011
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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