Densely detailed and sometimes slow going, but sheds a fresh light on many aspects of Whitman’s life and career.
The poet’s relationship with his brothers, one of whom saw heavy fighting during the Civil War.
Novelist and journalist Roper (Fatal Mountaineer, 2002, etc.) takes an inside look into the Whitman family with a special focus on the war years, when Walt’s younger brother George served with the 51st New York Volunteers. The book opens with a glimpse at the family’s early life, when Walt Sr. worked as a house carpenter, building homes that the family would live in while he found a buyer. Much of that time was spent in Brooklyn, where his widow Louisa continued to live during the war. The 51st fought in 21 battles, including Antietam, Fredericksburg and the Wilderness, so the family was constantly worried about George’s welfare. His brother’s involvement was at least part of the reason Walt spent much of the war in the nation’s capital tending to wounded Union soldiers. Another reason, Roper argues, was his attraction to the young men, some of whom may well have become his sexual partners. The author buttresses his argument by reproducing lists of men’s names Whitman compiled at several points in his life and quoting from the letters the poet wrote to some of the soldiers. George rose through the ranks to become captain of his company, and the family’s concern for him was always paramount. Roper quotes extensively from letters sent back and forth; some of the correspondence between the poet and his mother provides a refreshingly unvarnished view of Walt’s character. The account of George’s career, sometimes in the words of his own letters, reveals his casual bravery and lack of military ambition. His capture and imprisonment (with most of his unit) gave Walt a burning cause in the latter days of the war: fighting Grant’s policy of refusing to exchange Confederate captives until the South released the black Union soldiers it had captured.
Densely detailed and sometimes slow going, but sheds a fresh light on many aspects of Whitman’s life and career.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8027-1553-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2008
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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