Vivid portraits of some fairly crazy Brits and a way of life that deserved to be doomed.
British journalist Eade debuts with a well-written biography of Sylvia Brett Brooke (1885-1971), a tale that doubles as a history of the last days of the Raj.
The story takes place in Sarawak, a kingdom on the island of Borneo ruled from 1842 on by the autocratic Brooke family. The eponymous headhunters were the Dyaks, a ferocious and warlike people whose traditional practices the Brookes tried to eliminate, with mixed results. Sylvia’s husband, Vyner Brooke, became the third White Rajah of Sarawak in 1917, and she dubbed herself “queen of the headhunters” in her fanciful memoirs. Although an ineffective, irresponsible, disordered, hedonistic and largely absentee ruler, Vyner was vaguely devoted to providing for the welfare of his people, who loved him and celebrated whenever he and Sylvia returned to Sarawak. They rarely spent more than a few months per year in Sarawak, mostly to avoid the English winters. At home and abroad, Sylvia wrote novels, painted and night-clubbed; the author refers throughout to her unrestrained behavior and stories that “can’t be put on paper” but offers few specific examples. The ones he does provide—painting portraits of prostitutes, too much drinking and dancing—seem hardly excessive by the admittedly extravagant standards of colonial rulers. The Brookes were exceptional in their spending habits, however, leading a very high life (though rarely together) when back in England. The appearance of Machiavellian Gerard MacBryan as Vyner’s private secretary in the late 1920s launched years of plots about the succession; Sylvia was determined that her daughters not be excluded by primogeniture, but the Japanese settled the question by invading in 1941. Vyner and Sylvia were, of course, elsewhere at the time.
Vivid portraits of some fairly crazy Brits and a way of life that deserved to be doomed.Pub Date: June 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-250-04589-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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
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