A stale exploration of a nearly forgotten writer, offering little to enhance Grahame’s relevancy for modern readers.
A biography of the author of The Wind in the Willows.
First published in 1908, The Wind in the Willows has endured as a beloved children’s classic and has also gained a devoted adult readership. The story, which celebrates the pastoral delights found in the rural English countryside as experienced through the friendship of four anthropomorphized animals, originated as a series of bedtime stories told by Kenneth Grahame (1859-1932) to his son. Grahame’s vivid descriptions of the natural setting harkened back to memories of his own childhood wanderings. Though much of Grahame’s writing for children is joyful, his personal life, as described in this latest biography by Dennison (Over the Hills and Far Away: The Life of Beatrix Potter, 2017, etc.), was often bleak. Grahame’s mother died when he was young, and after living briefly with his unstable, alcoholic father, he and his siblings were sent to live with their grandmother in a rural home known as The Mount. He would often revisit this idyllic setting in his imagination throughout much of his adult life, inspiring many of his stories. But disappointment and loss continued to haunt Grahame as an adult. He was coerced by his guardian to take on a bank job rather than attend university, leading to lonely years in London beholden to a banking career while pursuing his writing interests. A late marriage would lead to further unhappiness, as their only child committed suicide before he was 20. Sadly, Dennison does little to enliven his portrait of Grahame. While respectful and not entirely unsympathetic, the author’s treatment feels like a commissioned exercise. His prose style is overly fusty, and Grahame’s portrait lacks the psychological probing one expects with contemporary scholarship. For instance, Dennison neglects to explore his subject’s sexual identity. Though a biographer is unlikely to prove that Grahame was a homosexual, this aspect of his personality has been strongly considered by other recent scholars.
A stale exploration of a nearly forgotten writer, offering little to enhance Grahame’s relevancy for modern readers.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64313-007-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
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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