In the sort of labor of love Dickens inspires, Epstein, author of The Friendly Shakespeare (not reviewed) and sometime university lecturer, has written her well-informed and engaging pop reference for those sick of the annual maladaptations of A Christmas Carol and students who have encountered them only as “textbooks, not novels.— Dickens biographers and scholars have been hard at work since Edmund Wilson to dismantle Dickens’s respectable Victorian facade, usually with Freudian tools, but The Friendly Dickens balances demystification with erudition as it encapsulates his prodigious work and literally Dickensian life. Peppered throughout are intriguing and odd bits of information, culled from a wide variety of sources, so that the casual browser will learn Dickens’s robust walking speed (4.8 m.p.h.), the total number of characters he created (13,143) and all those he killed off before the age of 25 (over a dozen), and the amount of dung deposited on London streets (40,000 tons per annum). Some of the liveliest and most opinionated sections are the interviews with fellow Dickens aficionados, including actors Roger Rees on the role of Nicholas Nickleby, Miriam Margolyes on Dickens’s women in her solo revue, and Patrick Stewart on his one-man Christmas Carol, and critics David Lodge on academic snobbery toward Boz and adapting Martin Chuzzlewit, Phyllis Rose on his marriage and mistress, and Jonathan Yardley on the cultural shifts in popular entertainment from books to movies. Ironically, the best reference section is an extensive filmography of every major screen and television adaptation, enlivened by Epstein’s assessments of W.C. Fields as Mr. Micawber, the discordantly cheerful Oliver!, and Michael Caine opposite Kermit the Frog in The Muppet Christmas Carol. Dickensian in every sense of the word, especially Victorian eccentricity and Pickwickian good humor. (illustrations, not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-83943-4
Page Count: 394
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1998
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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