As the son of Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West, Tory MP, cofounder of the British publishing house Weidenfeld & Nicolson, writer and editor, the author can't fail to pen an amusing though occasionally flat-footed memoir. As in Portrait of a Marriage (1973), Nicolson is best as Proustian observer, recounting with calm acquiescence the misadventures of his mother, the libertine, the influence of his father, the patrician man-of-the-world, and the antics of their Bloomsbury friends: Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Clive and Vanessa Bell, Lytton Strachey, et al. Though his tone is blithe and his sense of time past more a laundry list than a cohesive web, Nicolson's insights are sometimes startlingly profound, as when he says of Virginia Woolf's death: ``The reason why she killed herself was not that she feared madness or found the stress of war unendurable but that she thought she had lost the gift of writing, and what was the purpose of life if she could not describe it?'' His accounts of school days at Eton and Oxford are banal, as are reports of his stint with the Grenadier Guards in the African and Italian campaigns during WW II. His early fascinations with Mussolini and Hitler, and his failed attempt to snipe a German guard solely for the purpose of impressing a female war correspondent, are the only memorable facets of this period, and their sheer mindlessness makes Nicolson seem churlish. His subsequent account of his years as an MP and ``the single most important moment'' in his life, as an honorable abstainer in Parliament's vote for military intervention in the Suez crisis of 1956, redeems him as a conscientious statesman. More a compiler than a writer, the octogenarian Nicolson does manage, nonetheless, to sketch an insider's 20th-century Britain—a quiet treat for hopeless Anglophiles. (31 b&w photos, not seen) (Book-of-the-Month Club selection)
Pub Date: March 9, 1998
ISBN: 0-399-14363-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1998
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
PERSPECTIVES
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