Cohen, the editor of Carroll's herculean correspondence, succeeds with the man's Victorian character—both the academic and the eccentric elements—but misses the point of Carroll's pointless nonsense. Although Charles Lutwidge Dodgson kept his professional life of mathematical rectitude distinct from his private friendships with little girls and Lewis Carroll's nonsense, his life has had steady interest since his death, from Victorian damage control and Freudian psychoanalytic autopsies to, most recently, Derek Hudson's lively biography and Anne Clark's more somber one. Cohen's falls somewhere between the latter two in mood, but its new research and resources are unmatched. Carroll's childhood ironically receives a sketchy characterization, despite all the details of his humorous juvenilia, mathematical precocity, and, Cohen implies, a repressed battle of wills with his father the archdeacon. Dodgson the don emerges as a solid if myriad figure—keen amateur photographer; earnest, semisuccessful lecturer; scrupulously moral deacon; writer of pamphlets and squibs; and sentimental collector of ``child-friends.'' Although Carroll's relations with Alice Liddell and her sisters have been researched almost ad nauseam, Cohen centers in on their unexplained break (the relevant pages in Carroll's diary were posthumously destroyed by his niece). Through careful sifting of later evidence, Cohen supports the idea that Carroll somehow offended Mrs. Liddell's matchmaking sensibilities. He goes on to draw inconclusive connections between his outpourings of generalized spiritual remorse and his happy times with the Liddell girls recorded in the diary. Carroll's relations with little girls in general had elements of both the elder brother and the romantic, although there is no suggestion of sexual misconduct. After drubbing outlandish interpretations of the Alice books, Cohen instead suggests biographic allegories, rites of passage for both Alice Liddell and Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Cohen sees Dodgson finally as a talented, upright, melancholy figure, but does not fully integrate Carroll into this protean man. (135 illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 12, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-42298-6
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1995
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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