No literary tell-all, this chatty yet reflective history instead charts the Lowell family’s dissolution through money and mental illness. With considerable narrative deftness, novelist Stuart (Men in Trouble, 1998) motors through centuries of Lowells (James Russell was Robert Lowell’s great-granduncle, Amy a distant cousin) and related families, concentrating on some of Bobby’s (his family nickname) pivotal relations. There was his “cold and proper” mother, Charlotte Lowell; grandfather Arthur Winslow, whose approval he craved; and stern, rich Aunt Sarah, who loved yet then spurned Bobby. Sarah, the “sweet, silly” baby sister of Charlotte, centered the clan, revealing their occasional artistic blind spots (“Why doesn’t Bobby write about the sea?— she once asked. “It’s so pretty”) and holding the family together even when it didn’t want that. Depression-era real-estate investments and disinheritance in the 1960s lost the family money, and Stuart offers enough equivocation about it for cynics to call this the “I was related to Lowell and all I got was a lousy book contract” memoir. Not only did Great-uncle Cot (Sarah’s husband) bequeath fortune and effects to museums, but Stuart was also denied the official family “Sarah” painting by John Singleton Copley because she “didn’t have a proper wall to hang it on.” Stuart, who rebelled her way through the 1970s, knows the score: “we asked for such treatment, though we didn’t like it when we got it.” The family also lost money when financing psychiatric treatment for Bobby, for Stuart’s mother and brother, and others. Stuart describes the roller-coaster of manic-depression with precision and compassion; her quotations from Bobby’s works are particularly useful. Above all, she is matter-of-fact. Though her glib asides sometimes backfire and her analysis lacks distance, this is an idiosyncratic alternative view of a leading American literary family. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 3, 1998
ISBN: 0-06-017689-X
Page Count: 304
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1998
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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