Delightful, enchanting, and learned.
A jolly good nostalgic walk through Housman country.
British poet Ted Hughes described Alfred Edward Housman (1859-1936) as “the most perfect expression of something deeply English.” He could also have been describing Housman’s greatest work, the poetry collection A Shropshire Lad. In this capacious, generous work of literary and cultural history, Parker (The Last Veteran: Harry Patch and the Legacy of War, 2009, etc.) sets out to prove Hughes’ statement. In 1896, when Housman, then 37, was a professor of Latin, he self-published 500 copies of his small volume of 63 poems. In its first year, it sold only 381 copies in Britain and the United States combined. Because he wanted to make it affordable, Housman declined all royalties. By 1911, it had sold 13,500 copies and has never been out of print, becoming “one of the best-loved volumes of poetry in the language.” George Orwell claimed to have memorized the whole book when he was at Eton. Parker describes it as a “gazetteer of the English heart.” The author first offers a lengthy, affectionate biography of Housman, comparing him to Thomas Hardy, “another writer who straddled the Victorian and modern ages.” Housman composed much of the book while taking long, solitary walks in Hampstead Heath, and it was inspired by his unrequited love for a fellow university student, Moses Jackson. Parker next takes on the English landscape, explaining why Housman chose Shropshire for his setting. For Housman, it “was our western horizon, which made me feel romantic about it.” After a fascinating disquisition on the popular association of walking and poetry, Parker shows how extensively the poems influenced English music—e.g., Vaughan Williams, Morrissey and The Smiths—and how the book became an important companion for English soldiers. The author concludes by providing numerous examples of Housman’s and the poems’ appearances in modern culture (Inspector Morse, The Twilight Zone, The Simpsons) as well as the complete text of A Shropshire Lad.
Delightful, enchanting, and learned.Pub Date: June 20, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-17304-3
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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
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