The third and final volume of Graves’s life of his uncle (begun with Robert Graves: The Assault Heroic, 1986) completes the full, febrile metamorphosis of Robert Graves into a romantic, “muse-inspired” poet. This volume opens just after the tumultuous collapse of Graves’s stormy 14-year relationship with the American poet Laura Riding. Although Riding had guided and inspired some of Graves’s best work—including his WWI autobiography, Goodbye to All That, and his historical novel, I Claudius’she now scorned him and his work bitterly. Since Graves had always worked best when in love, it wasn—t long before he tried to salve his wounds with another young woman—the long- suffering Beryl Hodge. Although it would be almost another decade before Graves divorced his first wife, Nancy, he and Beryl soon settled down to domestic life. During the war, between minor novels, criticism, and scattered poetry, Graves wrote The White Goddess. This long, fiendishly involuted descant on the poet’s wells of inspiration, full of gnomic musings on trees and goddesses, managed to create for Graves a cult following that lingers to this day. After the war, on his beloved Majorca, Graves acted out his theories by ignoring Beryl and falling in love with a succession of beautiful young women, imbuing these —muses— with the mystical, hortatory powers of the Great White Goddess. These muses usually repaid his obsessive attention with distance and spite, spurring him on to even greater poetic effusions. The wonder of it is that from these silly, self-involved infatuations came some of the best love poetry of the late 20th century. If this biography has any flaws, they are its stupefying length and perhaps its overly narrow focus: The spotlight on Graves is so bright that it’s sometimes difficult to fully appreciate the important supporting players. But these are quibbles. Richard Graves has created a monument to a monument.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-75380-116-7
Page Count: 618
Publisher: Collins & Brown/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1998
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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