An insightful argument occasionally marred by somewhat tangential and glib analysis.
A literary biography of Charles Dickens focused on his life and work during the 1830s.
Douglas-Fairhurst (English/Magdalen Coll., Oxford; Victorian Afterlives: The Shaping of Influence in Nineteenth-Century Literature, 2002) writes that reviewers of the great author’s early work in the Monthly Magazine found his stories to be “a choice bit of humour, somewhat exaggerated” and “clever,” which was a backhanded compliment from the British press. These comments apply to Becoming Dickens as well. Douglas-Fairhurst frequently makes clever connections of dubious significance to his overall argument. In his otherwise useful examination of “A Dinner at Poplar Walk,” Dickens’ first published story, he pauses on the line “an appalling creaking of boots,” which he admits “has nothing to do with the main thrust of the story.” But he insists the word “boots” is important: “The notion that somebody’s personality resides in his boots is closely connected to Dickens’s interest in theater, where an actor trying to establish a character might decide to work from the bottom up but not get much further than choosing the right kind of footwear.” This kind of close reading permeates the book, often slowing the narrative momentum, but the author’s central argument, about the ways in which events in Dickens’ life shaped his fiction, is a worthy one. While writing later in life about a near-brush with acting, Dickens remarked, “See how near I may have been to another sort of life.” Douglas-Fairhurst shows demonstrates how the idea that a person could have just as easily ended up a clerk or a thief as a writer preoccupied Dickens and found its way into his fiction. The biographical concerns connect strongly and effectively to the literary material.
An insightful argument occasionally marred by somewhat tangential and glib analysis.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-674-05003-7
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Belknap/Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2011
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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