An illuminating biography of “an intelligent and thoughtful man.”
The life and times of a Spanish monarch who invigorated cultural life.
For more than 30 years, Alfonso X (1221-1284) reigned over a country beset by divisiveness, strife, and uncertainty. As Doubleday (History/Hofstra Univ.; co-editor: Why the Middle Ages Matter: Medieval Light on Modern Injustice, 2011, etc.) portrays him in this deeply researched history, Alfonso aspired to be a “teacher to his people,” ensuring “not only their political unity but also their happiness and well-being.” Kings, Alfonso believed, “resemble a mirror in which men view their own images.” He hoped to reflect “a Solomon…bequeathing his wisdom to his subjects and to future generations.” Literate in history, science, and the arts, Alfonso wrote texts that long survived him: songs, works on astronomy and astrology, and a legal and philosophical tract that influenced United States law into the 19th century. He aimed to institute reforms that would mark “a first step away from an older feudal order” to a rational, centralized government in which “the king and people had mutual obligations.” Central to Alfonso’s beliefs was the importance of happiness. He promoted games and sport, incorporated comedy in his religious songs, and delighted in dirty jokes. Laughter, he believed, was “good medicine.” Doubleday helpfully contextualizes Alfonso’s convictions and actions. He explores, for example, the place of humor in medieval culture; the meaning of friendship; attitudes about fatherhood; and assumptions about planetary and astral influence on human life. He asserts that Alfonso created a Castilian Renaissance centuries before the more famous Italian artistic flourishing, but he is also clear about the king’s shortcomings. Challenged by Muslim rebellion, roiling European politics, betrayal by family and friends, and repeated thwarting of his campaign to become Holy Roman emperor, Alfonso could be rash, vindictive, and manipulative. Drawing on Alfonso’s writings, contemporary—often contradictory—sources, and much scholarship, Doubleday has created a measured, persuasive history of a king and his precarious times.
An illuminating biography of “an intelligent and thoughtful man.”Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-465-06699-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2015
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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