A welcome, refreshing literary biography.
Victorian literature scholar Morrison presents the first biography of the infamous writer in three decades, and the first to include unpublished works.
A magnetic and controversial figure in his time, Thomas De Quincey (1785–1859), like many creative intellects, combined literary brilliance with drug addiction. His drug of choice, laudanum, provided alternating bouts of euphoria, lucidity and debilitating depression. Despite the negative side effects, De Quincey was able to build a provocative and influential body of work, from his iconic Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) to the terrifying short fiction he wrote toward the end of his career, which inspired the likes of Poe and Dickens. In his work on drug use, he innovatively used confessional writing directed at a mainstream audience, speaking “directly to our ongoing fascination with habit, desire, commercialism, and consumption.” His obsessive tendencies, toward drugs but also toward books, languages and death, may have originated during a childhood that was fraught with the loss of his sister, brother, and father, and a frustrating series of schools, none of which satisfied him. De Quincey also faced bouts of illness in his youth, which may have been treated with opium, a common ingredient in 18th-century medicines. At age 20, to treat a toothache, “one dose [of opium] changed everything,” and he began to use the drug in earnest. Around this time, he also began friendships with the poets Wordsworth and Coleridge, relationships he would maintain for most of his life. Misconceptions persist about De Quincey and his work, but Morrison’s adept narrative fills in many gaps and portrays the writer as a man struggling between the joys of writing and rigorous thought and the sorrows of addiction and debt. The author excels in his argument that De Quincey is an integral part of literary history, and above all, a “noble explorer of self.”
A welcome, refreshing literary biography.Pub Date: Dec. 15, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-60598-132-1
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2010
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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