A somewhat disjointed story that nonetheless successfully recounts how one woman dealt with her dysfunctional life.
Novelist Shakespeare (In Tasmania, 2004, etc.) searches for the realities of his aunt’s life before, during and after World War II.
The first portion of the book explains Priscilla’s childhood: Her mother ran off with one of a series of lovers; her father’s lover demanded Priscilla be sent off to Paris to live with her mother in 1926; her mother abused her. It was at school in St.-Germain-en-Laye that she met promiscuous Gillian, who became her lifelong friend and confidante. After a case of venereal disease and a badly performed abortion in Paris (her mother gave her the abortionist’s name), she met and married Robert, nearly 20 years her senior. In spite of her husband’s impotence, Priscilla enjoyed the luxuries of being a vicomtesse. When Robert was taken prisoner in the German invasion, her in-laws, fearful of losing their estates, turned her out. She was interned a short time as a British national but was released when she claimed pregnancy. This is when her history gets cloudy. When Priscilla returned to England after the war, she was a healthy woman with a suitcase full of designer clothes and little evidence of the ravages of wartime Paris. Was she a collaborator? Who were her protectors? A trove of papers, letters and photographs discovered by Shakespeare after Priscilla’s death paint the portrait of a woman who lived well. In occupied Paris, ordinary women were cast into extraordinary circumstances—their main goals were to procure enough clothing and food and not get shot. Priscilla’s letters and Gillian’s notebooks finally put names to Priscilla’s important Paris wartime lovers, and the author moves back and forth in time to narrate her life.
A somewhat disjointed story that nonetheless successfully recounts how one woman dealt with her dysfunctional life.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-229703-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2013
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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