From the prolific author of a long string of amusing doctor books (the Doctor in the House series) and quirky medical histories, an oddball assortment of chatty, impertinent anecdotes about the afflictions of 31 well-known people, real and fictional. This time, the doctor has his fun at the expense of such political figures as Washington, Napoleon, Hitler, and Churchill; royals such as Queen Victoria and Germany's Frederick III; literary luminaries from Boswell to Proust; and assorted others, including van Gogh, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes. Aware that Washington's ownership of false teeth is a familiar story, Gordon enlarges the retelling by informing us of 18th-century dental practice— transplants from cadavers, dentures from walrus tusks—thereby making us value dentistry's advances in recent times. The notion of medicine's progress permeates Gordon's accounts, for the treatments that 17th- and 18th-century doctors inflicted on patients— purgatives, enemas, bleedings, cuppings, and numerous foul concoctions—now seem not merely ineffective but downright death-promoting. Perhaps even more terrifying is the idea of surgery without anesthesia; Gordon's graphic description of the operation Pepys endured for removal of bladder stones sticks in the mind. Clever and gossipy, Gordon's brief anecdotes are full of name-dropping and sexual tittle-tattle: Boswell had gonorrhea, Carlyle was impotent, Florence Nightingale was a lesbian, and Hitler had only a right testicle. It is relief to come to the last chapter, where Gordon has the most fun of all with fictional figures. Dr. Watson's letter to Freud about his neurotic friend Holmes is a gem, as is Freud's reply. Discovering the human frailties of notable men and women (Byron had sclerosis of the liver, Proust suffered from mother-fixation, Elizabeth Barrett Browning was anorexic) does little to increase appreciation of their work but certainly cuts them down to size. For the most part, this is pretty low stuff, the National Enquirer for history buffs. (24 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: March 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-312-15048-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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