A top-notch biography.
The tale of one of the most disastrous marriages in English literary history—and how it reverberated through generations to come.
Prolific novelist and literary biographer Seymour (The Pity of War: England and Germany, Bitter Friends, Beloved Foes, 2014, etc.) returns to the familiar Romantic era ground she covered in her 2001 biography, Mary Shelley, with this wide-ranging dysfunctional family portrait. Raised as a beautiful, pampered, privileged social princess, Annabella Milbanke married the great poet Lord Byron with the most delusional of intentions: She would reform the rake who famously seduced anyone who didn’t seduce him first. However, no sooner were they on their honeymoon than Byron brought his half sister, Augusta Leigh, into the game and all but made love to her under the nose of his naïve and oblivious bride. Annabella, who only dealt with the unthinkable when it became the unavoidable, fled within a year, taking along Ada, her newborn daughter by Byron. Her marriage made her vindictive and cruel; she could wield the unpleasant and unlawful facts as a cudgel against Byron and Augusta as well as their unfortunate daughter Elizabeth Medora. More than that, she raised and molded Ada by herself, with results that went well beyond her control. While she nurtured Ada’s genius—she was the mathematical prodigy who became the explicator and promoter of Charles Babbage’s groundbreaking Analytical Machine, the forerunner of the computer—Ada was every bit her father’s daughter. The self-proclaimed “bride of science,” she supplemented her marriage with affairs and a disastrous interest in racehorse gambling; she also bristled under the restraints of her tightfisted and domineering mother. Seymour’s great achievement is the resourcefulness and diligence she brings to both Annabella and Ada, complex figures who alternately invite and test readers’ sympathies. Their inner and outer lives—along with those of dozens of others who populate this tragic farce—are told with singular narrative skill.
A top-notch biography.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68177-872-3
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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