A British journalist's attempt to make an influential but enigmatic Victorian literary figure accessible to a late-20th- century audience. Thomas Carlyle was a problem for the Victorians and has remained puzzling ever since. His abrupt, moralistic style remains as opaque today as it was to contemporary critics. When readers turn to Carlyle, they find many incoherent arguments and others that strongly resemble Nazi ideology. Heffer (deputy editor of London's Daily Telegraph) acknowledges those difficulties and sets out to justify Carlyle by setting him in context. As a straightforward, readable account of his life, Moral Desperado is a success. Heffer manages to convey a sense of how this awkward, ungracious hypochondriac addressed the moral and political anxieties of the world's first industrial nation, beset with urban slums and unprecedented class conflict. When attempting to make sense of Carlyle's often repellent political views, Heffer is much less successful. It is not enough simply to assert that those who object to Carlyle's racist power-worship are failing to put his ideas in context. It was, after all, another famous Victorian, John Stuart Mill, who characterized Carlyle in context as a ``moral desperado.'' Today it is even more difficult to come to terms with a writer whose solution to what he called ``the nigger question'' was whipping. What are we to make of a writer whose works were a favorite of Adolf Hitler? What are we to think of someone who was, by his own admission, horribly cruel to his wife? Heffer does little to answer those questions, and largely ignores the scholars of Victorian literature and culture who have labored to keep Carlyle's reputation alive. In spite of Heffer's rehabilitation, Carlyle remains in his hands as much of a moral desperado today as he was in his Victorian context.
Pub Date: Dec. 15, 1996
ISBN: 0-297-81564-4
Page Count: 420
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1996
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
PERSPECTIVES
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