Triumphant closing of Holroyd's massive life of George Bernard Shaw (1856-1951), begun with The Search for Love (1988) and The Pursuit of Power (1989)—a work 15 years in the writing. (The notes will be published separately.) Now WW I ends and Shaw, in a Chekhovian mood, writes Heartbreak House, his elegy for prewar England, a ``tragic'' play that he slyly complains has been accepted as ``a bedroom farce.'' Shaw girds himself for his greatest labor, the five-play metabiological history and future of mankind fantasy cycle, Back to Methuselah, an unplayably long philosophical treatise (well appraised by Holroyd) that nonetheless is staged first in Manhattan, then in Birmingham (England), much to Shaw's amaze. Then he refashions into English Jitto's Atonement, a play by his German translator, although Shaw's German is far, far worse than his translator's groping, misspelled English—and it's a hit! But the press is down on him for not being serious, so he accepts his wife Charlotte's urgings and decides to rescue the real Jeanne d'Arc from the cheesy image she's fallen into and once more allow her to be a legitimate heretic in his straightforward Saint Joan—for which he is universally praised for not being Shaw—and wins the Nobel Prize. Through all these events (which include helping T.E. Lawrence correct a six-pound manuscript of Seven Pillars of Wisdom), Shaw's letters and public wit glow with no dimming of luster, although the truth is that he's a deeply shy man who likes to be alone. Mentally, his last years are strikingly vigorous despite ``the lure of fantasy'' in his playwriting. Don't miss Shaw's joy during Charlotte's last days as she undergoes remission of neurotic anxieties and drops 40 years from her face. Holroyd keeps a lightly even voice throughout so that every word Shaw utters—and he is clearly the greatest wit in the English language—glistens with intelligence against his fading hopes for humanity. (Thirty-two pages of b&w photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-394-57554-7
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1991
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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