British poet and biographer Powell (Roy Fuller, not reviewed) displays an impressive knowledge of his subject and a delight...
A fresh, thoroughly enjoyable, and much-needed account of the early English Romantic, a favorite with his fellow poets.
Hailing from storm-tossed coast of East Anglia—his hometown of Aldeburgh now lies beneath the North Sea—Crabbe (1754–1832) was the son of a salt-tax collector with thwarted intellectual ambitions. Unfit for the usual sea-vessel work as a warehouseman, young George was educated first to become a surgeon, at which he did not excel, and then as a Church of England curate. His first attempts at poetry, The Library and The Village, reveal Augustan high-handedness; he was well-steeped in the works of Milton and Pope. But Crabbe was no rationalist son of the Enlightenment: his intense interest in botany (“Give me a wild, wide fen, in a foggy day”), use of opium, gloomy temper, and marriage to a woman inclined toward mental instability all helped produce the astonishing work of Romantic sensibility that would make his name. “Peter Grimes,” a poem about a melancholy old fisherman whose young apprentice boys disappear under suspicious circumstances, went on to haunt the imagination of E.M. Forster and Benjamin Britten, whose opera rescued Crabbe's work from becoming “dead as mutton,” as Somerset Maugham put it. With the death of his wife, Crabbe moved to Trowbridge and developed epistolary flirtations with young ladies; he made friends with Walter Scott and eventually trekked to Scotland. Although Crabbe’s work became unfashionable—and still is; the most recent biography was Neville Blackburne's The Restless Ocean, in 1972—Powell makes a persuasive case for his importance to such later writers as Dickens, Eliot, and Hardy, as well as Philip Larkin in the 20th century.
British poet and biographer Powell (Roy Fuller, not reviewed) displays an impressive knowledge of his subject and a delight in close reading of the texts that make this a surprisingly accessible biography.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7126-8999-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pimlico/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
