A simultaneously interesting and depressing story of arrested development, as sometimes occurs with those who write of...
With his broad knowledge of J.M. Barrie (1860-1937) and his contemporaries, Dudgeon (Maeve Binchy: The Biography, 2014, etc.) tells the disturbing story of his odd relationship with the Llewelyn Davies family.
The author points out that the story of Peter Pan features a spiritual dimension of childhood that transcends adulthood. Barrie adored the children of Sylvia and Art Llewelyn Davies, and the games he played with them in Kensington Gardens helped in the creation of Peter Pan. It was a process of improvisation and underwent constant revision over the years. Barrie readily admitted that he adored Michael in the strange sort of Edwardian love. The author explains it as best he can, noting the strong bond of boys away at public school. Michael unknowingly ruled Barrie. Stories were presented to Michael, who would finish them or reject them. Sylvia was the daughter of George du Maurier, author of Peter Ibbetson, a book that greatly influenced Barrie. Du Maurier was also a strong supporter of the concept of psychic ability, and Sylvia inherited his “more than earthly” aura. Barrie shared his paranormal fascination, and Sylvia encouraged Barrie’s obsession with her children, almost as if he were a second nanny, taking them off her hands. Her husband, mother, and especially her son, Jack, disliked his control. Jack was recommended by Barrie to Osborne Naval College to get him out of the way. After the death of Sylvia, Barrie took over the boys’ upbringing. It was a life of privilege and fishing excursions to Scotland, where Michael learned to cast off Barrie’s yoke. Insisting that there was no homosexual side to Barrie’s love, Dudgeon explores the man and his character, his obsession with death and the afterlife, the cruel side to his writings, and the strange illusions he created around himself.
A simultaneously interesting and depressing story of arrested development, as sometimes occurs with those who write of children’s heroes.Pub Date: July 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-08779-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
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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