Tactful yet open: much like Georgina’s personality. (16 pp. color and b&w photos, illustrations)
Scrupulous, smoothly presented biography of a flamboyant Regency aristocrat.
Moving at the center of a decadent society, Georgina, sixth Duchess of Bedford (1781–1853), had it all: wealth, position, personal magnetism, and a measure of political influence. She was, writes British political journalist Trethewey in this admiring portrait, a social climber, but not a snob, thanks to the influence of her unconventional mother, a Scottish noblewoman who taught her that “with great privilege came responsibilities to those who were less fortunate.” Yet Jane, Duchess of Gordon, also made sure her children married well, in Georgina's case accomplishing through the most exquisite diplomatic delicacy a union with John, Duke of Bedford. The marriage was mutually supportive and deeply affectionate, though that didn't preclude the Duchess's long liaison with the artist Edwin Landseer. “Affairs were commonplace in Regency society,” writes Trethewey; though outward conventions could not be violated, the Duke was “a loving but not a passionate man and so jealousy was not a natural emotion to him.” The author covers considerable political territory: feuds between the Whigs and Tories, the Bedfords’ support of Queen Caroline over the Prince Regent, the satirical hammering the couple took in the pages of John Bull, the fight against Parliamentary bribery spearheaded by Georgina’s stepson. But mostly this is the story of a Regency family’s “unashamedly hedonistic” lifestyle, much of it centered around their 3,000-acre estate at Woburn (“run like the most exclusive hotel”), with more intimate moments at Endsleigh, their palatial rustic cottage. The death of the Duke brought less secure financial times for Georgina, but Trethewey suggests she handled those with her usual aplomb. The fact that she was an attentive mother—unusual for a woman of her class—also helps attract readers to the appealing duchess.
Tactful yet open: much like Georgina’s personality. (16 pp. color and b&w photos, illustrations)Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7472-5476-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Headline
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2003
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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