History lite, but an agreeable diversion for undemanding general readers.
A snapshot of Victorian London during a sweltering season rife with scandals and smells.
The “great stink” came from the Thames, into which the city had unwisely been dumping untreated sewage for years. It reached crisis proportions in June 1858, “either the hottest or the second-hottest month on record,” as the temperature peaked at over 100 degrees. The Thames Purification Bill, which laid down broad financial and administrative outlines for cleaning up the river, was one of several controversial acts skillfully maneuvered through a fractious Parliament that summer by Benjamin Disraeli, flagged in the book’s subtitle along with Charles Dickens and Charles Darwin as the putative co-subjects of this rambling narrative by Ashton (Emeritus, English Language and Literature/Univ. Coll. London; Victorian Bloomsbury, 2012, etc.). In fact, the scandal over Dickens’ public separation from his wife and the stir created by the first public reading of Darwin’s ideas on natural selection share space with numerous other topics, including a juicy divorce trial involving his wife’s racy diary; cabinet member Edward Bulwer Lytton’s attempt to dispose of his difficult wife by having her involuntarily confined to an asylum; and a contretemps at the Garrick Club that resulted in the bitter estrangement of Dickens and fellow novelist William Thackeray. Ashton favors a highly episodic approach she calls “microhistory,” which seems to mean rehashing the minute particulars of contemporary periodicals now available digitally; it “can uncover hitherto hidden connections, patterns, and structures,” she asserts, but readers may feel it mostly serves as justification for the author to skip among a plethora of not-particularly-related topics, taking an impressionistic approach to chronology that does not make for clarity. Still, her rather sloppy text is partly redeemed by vivid character sketches and a breezy writing style.
History lite, but an agreeable diversion for undemanding general readers.Pub Date: July 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-300-22726-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2017
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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