A somber, important complement to Charles C. Calhoun’s vibrant Longfellow: A Rediscovered Life (see above).
Historian McFarland (The Brave Bostonians, 1998, etc.) paints a selective, complex, and ultimately enriching portrait of America's earliest psychological novelist in his middle years.
The narrative follows Hawthorne during nonconsecutive years over the last three decades of his life in Concord, Massachusetts. There he joined a community of such progressive kindred spirits as Emerson, Thoreau, and Bronson Alcott. Hawthorne, born in Salem and educated at Bowdoin College (Longfellow and future president Franklin Pierce were classmates), found an affordable manse there at the urging of Emerson in the summer of 1842, when the 38-year-old author of a short-story collection (Twice-Told Tales) was newly, ecstatically married to Sophia Peabody. Now Hawthorne could finally settle down to some serious writing, thus putting an end to the paralyzing, gloomy solitude of his earlier years. But it would take seven years more and penurious exile from Concord before he would return in triumph, having published The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables, to inhabit Concord more or less for good. Politics intervened in 1852, in the form of the incendiary Uncle Tom's Cabin (published a few weeks before Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance), the Fugitive Slave Act, and the election of Pierce to the presidency. The impecunious Hawthorne agreed to write a biography of Pierce, then served four years as US consul to Liverpool. As the Civil War erupted and Pierce was vilified for his Southern sympathies, Hawthorne was excoriated for his loyalty. He remains an enigmatic writer, drawn to the dark, fatal forces of the human psyche (appreciated even in those pre-Freudian days), as McFarland amply illustrates in his own sometimes turgid prose. The biography’s defining premise requires jumping around and backtracking, though McFarland provides excellent historical context to solidify the gaps. Relish the rich portraits of Margaret Fuller, Horace Mann (married to one of Sophia’s sisters), and publisher/travel companion William Ticknor.
A somber, important complement to Charles C. Calhoun’s vibrant Longfellow: A Rediscovered Life (see above).Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-8021-1776-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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