Many empty calories in this airy confection. (16 pages b&w photographs, not seen)
In prose so light that sentences nearly float up from the page, Lovell (A Rage to Live, 1998, etc.) chases the Mitford sisters (Nancy, Pamela, Diana, Unity, Jessica, and Deborah) hither and yon, from mansion to prison, from Hitler’s hideaway to the top of the bestseller lists.
Lovell declares that she had originally intended a sort of “frothy biography” but instead found so many conflicts, passions, and personal tragedies that the story darkened. Not really. Although there are indeed numerous family crises and catastrophes (unexpected deaths—one of Jessica’s children, a ten-year-old, was delivering newspapers when he was struck and killed by a bus—infidelities, and financial reversals), the story always rolls merrily along with little trenchant or compelling analysis of the meanings or effects of the events. So much froth remains. Still, the much-chronicled Mitfords remain a family with astonishing histories. Diana and Unity were infatuated with fascism and charmed by Hitler (Lovell does not believe they ended up in the sack). Unity, in fact, was so alarmed when England and Germany went to war that she shot herself in the head, somehow survived, and, in Lovell’s words, “remained childlike for the rest of her life.” (Hitler, ever accommodating, paid all her medical bills and saw that she got safely to Switzerland.) Back in England, Diana, whom the government considered a security threat, sat out three and a half years of the war in prison. Lovell can manage only the obvious: “This was the nadir of Diana’s life.” Jessica—denied an education by her parents (who saw no point in it for young women)—rebelled by becoming a Communist and later emigrated to America, where, after becoming a citizen, she found herself being grilled by the California Un-American Activities Committee. Lovell does not do justice to the Mitfords’ impressive, varied writing careers, often contenting herself with providing the titles and a jacket-flap kind of summary.
Many empty calories in this airy confection. (16 pages b&w photographs, not seen)Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-393-01043-0
Page Count: 600
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2001
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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