Amazingly dull for such a relatively short text concerning a group of brilliant artists during a lively cultural period.
Dreary biography of the writer best known for his 12-novel sequence, A Dance to the Music of Time.
Indeed, British journalist Barber’s main interest here seems to be in telling readers exactly which real-life people inspired the series’ fictional characters. This could be interesting, since Powell (1905–2000) numbered among his acquaintances such leading literary figures as Evelyn Waugh, George Orwell, Malcolm Muggeridge, and Cyril Connolly. But Barber’s approach is numbingly literal (an interminable discussion of which Oxford don was the basis for the manipulative Professor Sillery, for example), and he does little to convey the distinctive qualities of Powell’s work. The author’s other primary concern, making sure readers realize that he personally met many of these distinguished folk, similarly provides scant insight and plenty of annoyance; not many biographers are so eager to document contact with their subject that they would quote a journal entry in which Powell, commenting on being interviewed by Barber, describes him as “an uninspiring figure, to say the least.” Readers willing to wade through such tangential material can glean a few facts about Powell’s privileged background (Eton, Oxford), his party-going days as a Bright Young Thing in the 1920s, the mildly conservative and largely apolitical stance that put him at odds with London’s left-wing literary climate of the ’30s, his military service during WWII, etc. They will learn almost nothing about the artistic convictions or intentions that prompted A Dance to the Music of Time; Barber doesn’t even bother to properly explain that the title comes from a painting by Poussin, merely tossing off a reference that assumes his readers already know all about it. His habit of referring to fictional characters as though they were real people will be equally irritating to those who picked this up assuming they might find it interesting even if they were not familiar with every word Powell wrote.
Amazingly dull for such a relatively short text concerning a group of brilliant artists during a lively cultural period.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2004
ISBN: 1-58567-618-7
Page Count: 338
Publisher: Duckworth/Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
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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