Shelden bases his conclusions on correspondence and archival research but often conjectures about what “must have” occurred....
How a secret love affair inflamed Herman Melville’s fiction.
Biographer Shelden (Young Titan: The Making of Winston Churchill, 2013, etc.) claims that Melville’s novels, including Moby-Dick, were inspired by his love for Sarah Anne Morewood, his attractive, young, married neighbor. This passionate relationship, he argues, stands as “the powerful key to unlocking his secrets,” although nearly every other Melville biographer has ignored it. Melville and Morewood met in 1850, when both were summering in the Berkshires, where she had bought property. Soon after, Melville borrowed money from his father-in-law to acquire a tract of land adjacent to the Morewoods' and moved his family from New York. There, “in the grip of his own obsession,” he wrote feverishly about an obsessed captain’s hunt for an elusive whale. The novel, Shelden argues, “is the result of the author’s own extended dive into the depths of his life.” Morewood, pretty, restless, and flirtatious, sounds like a version of Madame Bovary. Leaving her boring husband to his business, she loved hiking, parties, and champagne. The famed physician Oliver Wendell Holmes, also an admirer of hers, observed her effect on Melville. Holmes’ novel Elsie Venner, “a tale of characters searching for love and willing to do anything for it,” offered a “revealing glimpse into Melville’s secret life.” Shelden argues that Melville himself exposed the affair in Pierre, about “an idealistic youth whose life is forever changed by his romance with a dark, mysterious beauty” who claims to be his secret half sister and lures him away from his “uncomplicated” girlfriend, just as Morewood lured Melville away from his wife. The emotionally fraught novel, with its inexplicable theme of incest, proved too much for readers and ended Melville’s trajectory to fame.
Shelden bases his conclusions on correspondence and archival research but often conjectures about what “must have” occurred. Nonetheless, he offers a provocative portrait of the canonical writer and his world.Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-241898-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
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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