Exhaustive work by a clear admirer and dogged researcher.
A sturdy, busy multibiography of an eminent American family.
From the first forebear of means, Percival Lowle (the spelling of the name changed in the early 1720s) to the celebrated poet Amy Lowell, who died in 1925, Sankovitch (Signed, Sealed, Delivered: Celebrating the Joys of Letter Writing, 2014, etc.) traces this long-enduring, Anglo-Saxon Massachusetts family and its many sterling American achievements. The author moves chronologically, as the generations of Lowells flourished in parallel with American history, and she delineates her work by themes: Migration, Religion, Revolution, Acquisition, War, Reinvention. Throughout their history, community and duty undergirded the lives of these competent, strong-chinned folk; it was important “to exercise one’s own personal gifts—for the good of the community and for the approval of God.” Migrating to America to further his import/export business and to embrace a more “honest and simple life,” Percival was dedicated to assimilating and prospering. His great-grandson, the Rev. John Lowell, became a popular Puritan preacher who weathered the schism with Presbyterianism. Later, another John (there were many Johns through the years) moved to Boston and threw his support to the patriots during the American Revolution. In the mid-1800s, James “Jamie” Russell Lowell—whose brother had bankrupted the family mining business and whose uncle was a writer for truth and justice—would become one of the most famous of the clan, a fierce anti-slavery poet, influential during the era of the Civil War and noted for a distinctly American voice. Another branch of the family would beget notable siblings Amy, the wildly popular poet; another Percival, a groundbreaking astronomer in the late 1800s who founded the historic Lowell Observatory in Arizona; and Lawrence, who served as president of Harvard from 1909 to 1933. Reverends, poets, soldiers, scientists: generation after generation re-created the original Percival’s stalwart American vision.
Exhaustive work by a clear admirer and dogged researcher.Pub Date: April 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-06920-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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