Unparalleled research, transparent prose, and wide eyes can serve as a model for other biographers—indeed, for all other...
The third in the author’s series of riveting titles about the histories, activities, duties, and effects of biographers.
Holmes (Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air, 2013, etc.), who has written major biographies of Shelley, Coleridge, and others, has published previously on his current themes (Footsteps and Sidetracks), and his new volume brings together thoroughly rewritten pieces that had earlier incarnations as speeches, essays, and various ruminations. Early on he reiterates his fundamental belief that biographers must pursue their quarry: follow their footsteps and explore their sidetracks. Holmes proceeds to do so again here in sections that revisit the lives of the celebrated (Wollstonecraft, Shelley—both Mary and Percy Bysshe—Coleridge, Keats, Blake), but he also reacquaints us with some lesser-known notables like Margaret Cavendish, Isabelle de Tuyll, and Mary Somerville. The author’s focus remains sharp throughout, as he sketches his individuals’ lives, discusses the published biographies of them (from the earliest to the latest), and reveals his theories and beliefs about the writing of biography, beliefs that he has used to develop graduate courses in biography. Holmes proves to be a generous critic of the work of his predecessors and contemporaries—the word “superb” appears more than once—and he evinces awe when he considers what some early biographers experienced and endured to complete their work. In a few chapters, the author revises what we have previously thought about Coleridge’s early lectures and about the importance of Shelley’s drowning. Most impressive, though, are Holmes’ erudition—is there a relevant text he has not read or a significant site he has not visited?—and his clear, sharply focused prose. Throughout, he manifests the patience and the persistence to do right by his subjects.
Unparalleled research, transparent prose, and wide eyes can serve as a model for other biographers—indeed, for all other writers.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-307-37968-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017
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
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
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