A revealing portrait of a unique talent, a deeply religious artist who saw God’s wonder and mystery in all.
The intensely private, pious, sometimes melancholic and tortured life of the English Jesuit whose remarkable poems did not appear until a quarter-century after his death.
Mariani (English/Boston Coll.; Death and Transfigurations, 2005, etc.) employs the present tense throughout, no doubt to lend immediacy to the introspective Hopkins (1844–89), who broke, then reconciled with his moderate Church of England family to become a Jesuit priest devoted to the classics and to disciplined adherence to his vows. Using the poet’s journal, meditations, sermons and copious correspondence with friends and family as well as his verse, Mariani depicts Hopkins as a revolutionary poet who pioneered the use of sprung rhythm and used the natural world to inform his life, his preaching and his art. The diminutive Jesuit was a vigorous hiker, a voracious reader and a curiously asexual man, though he reportedly stopped a Latin class late in life to inform the surprised (and certainly delighted) students that he’d never seen a naked woman—but wished he had. Beginning in 1866 with the young Hopkins agonizing over his conversion, the narrative then circles back to his birth and proceeds in fairly conventional chronological fashion, each chapter covering a few years. The author takes us through Hopkins’s undergraduate years at Oxford, his Jesuit training and various positions within the order, including his final appointment as a professor of classics in Dublin, where he battled melancholy and failing health, writing friends frequently to complain about the onerous burden of marking student exams. Mariani stops periodically to consider in detail—and with considerable insight—the poems Hopkins was composing at that particular moment.
A revealing portrait of a unique talent, a deeply religious artist who saw God’s wonder and mystery in all.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-670-02031-7
Page Count: 456
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2008
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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