by Peter Levi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1994
Levi's tact, good sense, respectful insight, and talent for the telling detail would have won even the heart of Tennyson...
Acknowledging his debt to Robert Bernard Martin's Tennyson (1980), Levi (formerly, Poetry/Oxford Univ.; The Frontiers of Paradise, 1988, etc.) dispels the biographical fog emitted by Tennyson descendants, apologists, and idolaters, and—in a relatively brief but penetrating analysis—reveals the man behind the icon, the poet laureate whose odd appearance and eccentric behavior distanced him from the intimacies his fame encouraged.
Tennyson (1809-92), the fourth of 12 children, was born into a parsonage family beset by madness, addiction, and melancholy. He published his first poems with his brother when he was only 18, and, by 1850—in spite of recurrent depression, fits of wandering, excessive drinking and smoking, misguided idealism, and equally misguided medical treatment for various hypochondriacal illnesses—he'd become the most popular poet in England, a status he achieved largely through In Memoriam, an epic elegy to his late friend, Arthur Henry Hallam. He spent many years dithering with Idylls of the King, a 12-book poem that combined the fashion for medieval romance with contemporary social criticism, and that captured the voice and values of England—industrial, competitive, moralistic, pious, sentimental, and nostalgic—in hundreds of poems, each characterized by his talent for felicitous turns of phrase. Tennyson married a 37-year-old who bore him two sons, one of whom was to write his biography; his friends included Wordsworth, Arnold, Browning, Carlyle, and, after he became poet laureate, even Queen Victoria, who forgave his crusty manners because he could deliver on time the occasional verse she required. Throughout, Levi skillfully sketches Tennyson's background (the chaotic undergraduate life at Cambridge), recounting many vignettes (Tennyson riding on the first steam railroad train) and anecdotes (the poet among his many siblings, eating dinner, courting).
Levi's tact, good sense, respectful insight, and talent for the telling detail would have won even the heart of Tennyson himself, whose special aversion was biographies.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-684-19662-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1993
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by Peter Levi
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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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