and keeps on happening, to this day. (First serial to Commonweal; author tour)
Illiterate adolescent peasant girl, prompted by inner voices, turns knight-redeemer of her country—temporarily. A life of the
martyr Joan of Arc (1412–31), presented (contradictions intact) by a lifelong admirer. Gordon (Seeing Through Places, 2000, etc.), whose works often portray women confronting faith, pinpoints how “Gift, chance, accident, coincidence” converged during the Hundred Years” War to manifest such a heroine, crusading to crown an unwilling Dauphin as God’s elect who would ransom France. Gordon highlights how Joan vindicated here prophetic status by manipulating symbols (her divinely designed battle standard, her armor, and her male dress) to leverage untrustworthy men: the king who soon shunned his champion, the companions-in-arms who fought then flitted, the French royals who sold her out, and the accusers who tried and burned her as a heretic. Gordon qualifies the myths surrounding this incredibly brave and resilient down-to-earth na‹f: Joan was surprised when a wound she “foretold” actually hurt, and shaken when confronted with war’s human misery. A chronology stresses the enforced brevity of Joan’s career: a fitful tactician alive only in action (when Joan let “her military judgment and her religious scruples” diverge), both her victories and her charisma vanished soon enough. Gordon (like Joan’s rehabilitators) does not discuss “the difficult issues of inspiration and its verification,” however, leaving us to wonder about the question that stands at the center of the legend: namely, whose heavenly directives are genuine? And who can we know? All contention is focused upon that strong unviolated female body, remote from standard hierarchies of sex, class, deference, chivalry, orthodoxy. Though analogies intended as timeless fall short (“Girls aren’t supposed to brag”), Gordon trenchantly discerns how virginity granted autonomy, and one senses that Joan’s mission required neither gender. Surveying the manifold purposes served by this idiosyncratic saint, Gordon characterizes her best: “the patroness of the vivid life.” A bold “biographical meditation” that persuades the skeptic to meditate on the inexplicable something Joan made happen,
and keeps on happening, to this day. (First serial to Commonweal; author tour)Pub Date: April 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-670-88537-1
Page Count: 180
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
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