This first volume of Monk's biography cohesively, skeptically analyzes the aristocratic philosopher's mathematically logical intellect, Victorian purposefulness, and Edwardian mores. While T.S. Eliot offered a thinly veiled portrait of Russell in the figure of the disturbing, priapic Mr. Apollinax, Monk (Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, 1990) finds a more suggestive portrait in the Mephistophelean, misanthropic Dr. Mallako in Russell's own short story ``Satan in the Suburbs.'' Monk locates the key to Russell's curious mix of characteristics (cold intellectual pursuits, private passions, loudly proclaimed public stands on issues such as pacifism) in his deep sense of alienated solitude, touched with fears of madness. Without overstating his case, Monk goes back to the orphaned Russell's miserable, spiritually imprisoned childhood under his grandmother's Puritanical care, enlivened only by his discovery of geometry and Shelley. After being tutored at his ancestral home—which he called ``a family vault haunted by the ghosts of maniacs''—Russell shook off his religious upbringing and took up philosophy in earnest at Cambridge. The revelation of his family's streak of insanity, however, tainted his engagement to Alys Pearsall Smith and haunted Russell. Monk gives a convincing, meticulous account of Russell's brilliant development with Alfred North Whitehead of ``logical atomism,'' explored in Russell's influential works The Principles of Mathematics and Principia Mathematica, deftly interweaving these explorations with a record of Russell's turbulent life during this fertile period. His marriage was disappointing, and he began a tumultuous love affair with Lady Ottoline Morrell (the first of many liaisons). Devoting the book's last half to Russell's pacifist activities during WW I, Monk takes Russell from cloistered don to international figure, and even hopeful father. In Russell's paradox of a life, Monk uncompromisingly, enlighteningly reveals a complex mixture of caddishly cold behavior, profound intellectual passion, and a fierce social conscience. (illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 4, 1996
ISBN: 0-684-82802-2
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1996
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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