Coote (W. B. Yeats: A Life, not reviewed), brings to life the Restoration and the sly, lascivious king who personified it. Beginning in 1628 as Charles I learns that his favorite, the Duke of Buckingham, has been murdered, Coote ignites interest early and illuminates the murky labyrinth of 17th century English politics. Writing with felicity and panache, he explains the fall and execution of Charles I; the rise and fall of the Cromwells; the initial failures of the beheaded king’s son, young exile Charles Stuart, to martial forces from continental allies to help him regain the throne; and his eventual return in 1660 to assume the crown. Coote displays his considerable narrative gifts to greatest advantage in his account of young fugitive Charles plotting to leave England while Cromwell’s spies are combing the countryside for him. And the pages devoted to London’s Great Fire of 1666 are swift and lyrical: “Huge fireballs rolled with awful destruction, and, drawing the air to themselves, created vacuums of such a scale that spires and ancient walls imploded, destroyed by an invisible power few if any understood.” But Coote is equally adept at clarifying the complex geopolitical questions of a time when internecine political alliances raged like flash fires, and at examining the ferocious anti-Catholic prejudices that were as destructive to London’s social fabric as the Great Fire was to its real estate. He savors the irony of the ailing Charles’s deathbed conversion to Catholicism, especially in the context of spicy details about the king’s sex life (seven mistresses produced 12 bastards) and about other excesses at court: An 18-inch dwarf kept by Charles’s mother was once “brought to the dinner table hidden in a pie.— Working the vein of English royal history previously prospected by popular historians Carolly Erickson, Antonia Fraser, and Alison Weir, Coote strikes gold. (16 pages photos)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-22687-X
Page Count: 396
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1999
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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