Dr. Johnson was engaged, according to Dr. Fussell's entertaining monograph, in savagely honest exercises in this world's significations and the obligations attendant on the next. Pragmatic, empirical, regarding literature as a "quasi-legal argument" involving the absolute mastery of techniques, Johnson was wholly of his age, but contributed less of a lordly overview than an aggressive, corrosive determination to "locate reality." Fussell explores the major works — the Rambler selections, Rasselas, the Dictionary, Lives of the English Poets — and there are gallivanting analyses of such bizarre items as letters on behalf of a condemned man, prayers, and early Grubb Street work. There are representations of various forms in Johnson's unique and powerful style, where elegance is reckoned as a "function of benevolence." Johnson's apparent terror of death and his resultant determination to let no talent lodge in him useless, was according to Fussell, a constant goad to write (which he hated to do), although this may be an over-emphasis. Fussell's finest moments come in his explication of the Lives, a happy confident leap amid a montage of Johnson's contradictions, and he exits in a buccaneer baroque fashion: "Johnson's species (sic) in the Lives is the writer as representative man. . . obliged to adhere to genres. . . he has not devised; tormented by the hunger of imagination. . . : and finally carried away by the very stream of time which it has been his ironic ambition to shape, and by shaping to arrest." A fair and fine tribute to a dark and aggravating presence.
Pub Date: March 10, 1971
ISBN: 039330258X
Page Count: 303
Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1971
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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