A compact, pithy, and generous biography of a novelist who found great success despite writing in the age of Dickens, Eliot,...
The latest installment in the author’s Brief Lives series is dedicated to the popular British novelist Wilkie Collins (1824-1889).
Uber-prolific biographer and novelist Ackroyd (Alfred Hitchcock, 2015, etc.) calls Collins the "sweetest-tempered of all the Victorian novelists." His fictional London was one of "confused identities, both sexual and social, in which no one had a secure home." Thanks to his accomplished painter father, Collins' home life was very secure; his first book was a biography of his dad. Ackroyd begins by describing Collins' "peculiar" appearance. He was shortish, as were his arms and legs, and his head was large and had a noticeable bump on one side. Ackroyd thinks the attention that Collins always draws to his characters' physical abnormalities can be traced back to his own. He was also plagued throughout his life by frequent pains in his face and eyes and became addicted to laudanum early on. He went to law school but never practiced. His knowledge of the law, however, was put to good use in his novels, and Collins and Charles Dickens became close friends and collaborators. Dickens' magazines published some of Collins' works, and they acted together in plays each had written. Collins’ first published novel, Antonia, about pagan Rome, which Ackroyd calls "essentially hokum," sold well. Other workmanlike novels—plot and suspense were his strengths—followed, but the 1860s brought him massive popularity and sales. Ackroyd makes a strong case for reading (and rereading) the masterpieces from this period: the "elaborate and ingenious" The Woman in White, his "greatest" novel, and the innovative, influential The Moonstone, the "paradigm of the detective story." He also resuscitates and rescues from obscurity some of Collins' lesser-known works, such as No Name and Armadale.
A compact, pithy, and generous biography of a novelist who found great success despite writing in the age of Dickens, Eliot, and Trollope.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53739-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2015
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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