This year's newest contribution to the Bloomsbury collection is another rather lugubrious biography of Virginia Woolf, with special attention paid to her relationships with the painter and critic Roger Fry and her artist sister, Vanessa Bell. ``How on earth does one explain madness and love in sober prose with dates attached?'' Woolf asked in her diary, while at work on her biography of Fry. Woolf's own biographers have had even more trouble with her tragic life, and Reid (English/Louisiana State Univ.) lurches with leaden pedantry through her interpretation of Woolf's unhappy family relations, Bloomsbury associations, mental illness, and artistic drive. With the biographic facts essentially known but still open to interpretation, Reid forgoes the Oedipal complex some previous biographers have attributed to Woolf's relations with her industriously literary, eminently Victorian father, Leslie Stephen. Instead, she focuses on Woolf's estrangement from her compulsively self-sacrificing and distant mother, Julia, and her sibling rivalry with her sister. Sometimes nearly villainizing Vanessa Bell, Reid casts her both as an artistic competitor and an unreliable mother- substitute, who helped take charge of Virginia during her first suicide attempt and, Reid argues, precipitated her last, successful one. Even when lengthily recounting Virginia's innocent (for Bloomsbury) but indiscreet flirtation with Vanessa's husband, Clive Bell, Reid can still rap Vanessa for insensitivity. Roger Fry displaces Leonard Woolf and Vita Sackville-West as the central figure in Woolf's life as both friend and aesthetic cohort, illuminating the way in which Virginia took inspiration from Modernist painting for her literary experiments. Otherwise, though, Reid treats Woolf's literary drive as largely an emotional defense (against her siblings), attention-getter (with her parents), and inevitably, therapy, with all the latest ``enabling'' jargon. Despite her tracing of the more interesting theme of writing vs. painting in Woolf's life, Reid's try for psychological insight here often reads like a psychiatrist's report. (60 illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-19-510195-2
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1996
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
© Copyright 2026 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.
