A meticulously researched, well-styled academic study showing Chaucer as the “consummate networker.”
A thorough look at the rich “imaginative development” of the author of The Canterbury Tales.
Turner (English/Jesus Coll., Univ. of Oxford) concentrates on the cultural and intellectual currents in Geoffrey Chaucer’s life (c. 1342-1400), declaring that the “emotional life” of this medieval English author is “beyond the biographer’s reach.” As she writes, “I’ve chosen to tell the story of his life and his poetry through spaces and places, rather than through strict chronology.” The author manages to glean a great deal about her subject’s life: his childhood in Vintry Ward, London, as the son of a prosperous wine merchant; his witness to the ravages of the Black Plague; his lifelong political attachment to the reigning English sovereign, Edward III, and his royal household. As a young teen, Chaucer's employment with Elizabeth de Burgh, the countess of Ulster, allowed him to absorb all the trappings of wealth while his subsequent travels as ambassador and accountant to Edward and John of Gaunt to France and Italy exposed him to the wildly popular medieval love tales of the time, such as “Roman de la Rose.” As he pursued his own work, Chaucer wrote in English; Turner partly explains his choosing to write in the vernacular as a kind of international trend of the time. Later, his exploration of innovative rhythms led to the invention of the iambic pentameter. The Canterbury Tales, written during his last years living and working at the counting house in the commercial heart of London, reveals the enormous diversity of personages he encountered; this is especially evident in the novel nuances in his portrayals of women. Turner also diligently explores the inspirations behind Chaucer’s recurrent metaphors, demonstrating how he “repeatedly emphasized in his poetry the need to go to the streets and listen to all kinds of people.” Though perhaps too dense for general readers, the book is well-suited to scholars and students of medieval literature.
A meticulously researched, well-styled academic study showing Chaucer as the “consummate networker.”Pub Date: April 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-691-16009-2
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
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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