A stylish, erudite meditation worthy of its provocative subject.
Beginning with a tale of early modern industrial espionage, newcomer Melchior-Bonnet considers the mirror’s significance in moral, religious, and philosophical discourse throughout history.
In the 17th century, Venetian craftsmen were smuggled into France to staff the Royal Glass Company in an attempt to undermine the Italian monopoly. The Venetian government retaliated with kidnappings, forged letters, and other subterfuges to protect what they regarded as a state secret: the techniques of mirror manufacture. Out of the ensuing battle for a growing market emerged technological developments that transformed the mirror from a rare and costly object into a staple artifact of modern experience. From antiquity onward, mirrors stood for what is most wonderful and problematic about sight, both defining and extending the limits of vision. During the Middle Ages the mirror’s religious impact was twofold: in the humanist tradition, it served as a reminder of how the human body reflected the divine image; but another vein of Christian morality viewed the mirror as a tool of Satan, a snare especially for women, whose sexuality it made monstrous and threatening. The mirror’s social function as an instrument of self-knowledge similarly engendered a dual aspect: it was a dispassionate observer, judging the gazer's looks and demeanor on behalf of the public eye; and also a secret partner and accomplice, conspiring to blot out consideration of anything but the self. To the mirrors of truth and vanity are added the distorting mirror of madness, which alters what it reflects to reveal fresh truths or terrors, and the permeable mirror of dreams, which presents an alternative and contingent reality. Bonnet-Melchior discusses all these ideas in terms of representative literary, philosophical, and pictorial texts spanning the centuries. These readings are uneven: the author clearly knows more about literature and philosophy than she does about art, but the scope of her ideas and her evident ease with the broad range of materials compensate for occasional interpretive weaknesses. Alas, they must also overcome the translator's inappropriate colloquialisms and botched allusions.
A stylish, erudite meditation worthy of its provocative subject.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2001
ISBN: 0-415-92447-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Routledge
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2001
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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