The curtain at least partly raised on a charmed and haunted life.
A scholar’s debut recounts the life and troubling death of a Gilded Age woman.
In the Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, D.C., a brooding, bronze figure marks the too-early grave of Marion Hooper “Clover” Adams (1843–1885), known, if at all, to posterity as the wife of a distinguished man and as a suicide. This shrouded, enigmatic Saint-Gaudens masterpiece appears almost to warn off biographers intent on probing the puzzle of Clover’s life. But Dykstra (English/Hope Coll.) proceeds boldly and supplies us with all the recoverable details, even if the mystery remains. A child of privilege in Transcendental Boston, Clover received the best progressive education then available to young women. She came of age during the Civil War, bold, athletic and passionate about art, reading and foreign languages. She charmed the likes of John Hay, Clarence King, Henry James and, of course, her husband, the celebrated professor, editor and historian Henry Adams, the direct descendant of two presidents. (Indeed, both Henrys modeled characters in their novels, at least in part, on her.) Though she confidently presided over a Washington home that sparkled with wit, 13 years into her marriage she swallowed a lethal chemical used in her photography, a three-year-old avocation for which she was beginning to develop a reputation. Why? Dykstra finds shadows in Clover’s seemingly enviable life: the early death of her poet mother (Clover was only five), the suicide of a favorite aunt and the unusual closeness between Clover and her physician father who died only months before she took her own life. Clover’s childlessness and the infatuation of her husband with a pretty, young and unhappily married friend may also have contributed to the overwhelming depression that marked her final months. Relying on letters and photographs, even the placement of pictures in an album, Dykstra teases all this out, occasionally appearing to over-read clues to Clover’s inner life. Is it significant that Clover used one of the tools of her art to kill herself, or was potassium cyanide merely the death-dealing agent closest to hand?
The curtain at least partly raised on a charmed and haunted life.Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-618-87385-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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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