A capable, readable life of a man who was arguably less accomplished but inarguably more interesting than his younger...
A lively biography of Inigo Jones (1573–1652), “a proud, vain, quarrelsome hypochondriac” who, in his odd moments, designed some of England’s most famous buildings.
Not many of Jones’s buildings stand intact, allows Londoner and journalist Leapman (The World for a Shilling, not reviewed), and “many works speculatively attributed to Inigo are now thought to have been designed by others.” Still, the plan of Covent Garden and the reality of London’s Banqueting House, before which Charles I lost his head in January 1649, provide ample evidence of his brilliance as a designer and builder who improved Italianate models with his own innovations. Jones’s rise to fame and influence was unlikely, for he was born into comparative poverty, the son of a clothmaker. Yet, thanks to a sort of Head Start program put into place by Queen Elizabeth in the later stages of her reign, he was given a chance to travel to Italy, soak up some culture, and, more important, get to know the nobility. As a dedicated “young man on the make,” Jones soon came into his own as a designer of masques—elaborate and strange rituals of the rich and famous of the day, which Leapman nicely deconstructs—and as a litterateur who was the sometime friend, sometime rival of the likes of Ben Jonson and George Chapman. Considering his highly evolved toadying, it’s ironic that Jones’s most famous building should have been a “backdrop for regicide,” but Cromwell and company almost certainly did so deliberately, counterposing Jones’s classicism with their own ideas of modernity as they relieved Charles of his head. Leapman brightly writes that in this instance Jones’s “scenery, as always, but immaculate; but on this occasion he had no control over the script.”
A capable, readable life of a man who was arguably less accomplished but inarguably more interesting than his younger contemporary Christopher Wren.Pub Date: July 15, 2004
ISBN: 0-7553-1002-0
Page Count: 412
Publisher: Headline
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 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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