With skill, humor, and sound scholarship, Coote drags into the foreground a man whom history has carelessly consigned to the...
A sturdy and occasionally stirring biography of the Restoration bureaucrat and celebrated diarist Pepys (1633–1703).
Coote (Royal Survivor, 2000) rightly acknowledges Pepys’s remarkable diary as the greatest single source of information available for much of the quotidian detail of Restoration life. Pepys himself was a kind of Zelig: as a teenager he was present at the beheading of Charles I, he graduated from Cambridge, excelled at music, and became the trusted servant and secretary for naval affairs for Charles II, a member of Parliament whose speeches displayed a mastery of detail and rhetoric, a fellow of the Royal Society, an eloquent witness of the Great Fire, and a devoted fan of Restoration drama whose comments on individual productions appear in countless histories of English theater. His diary also records his more prurient interests, for Pepys, although married, was a pretty randy fellow. Barmaids, servant girls, wives of subordinates, women who happened to be near him in church—all were targets for his roving eyes and exploring hands. (Indeed, it was not until his wife caught him with his hand up the skirt of a servant that his serial adultery began to slow.) The author paints a portrait of a committed bureaucrat, a Restoration workaholic whose fierce attention to detail and mastery of the memorandum enabled him to rise in civil service until he was made responsible for the outfitting of the Royal Navy. Later, when venomous anti-Catholicism began to poison public life, Pepys literally fought for his life as determined enemies of the Catholic kings Charles II and James II sought to approximate regicide by destroying the credibility of the king’s trusted advisers with spurious charges of popery. His eyesight failing, Pepys eventually cleared his name and enjoyed a rich retirement surrounded by his beloved books and friends.
With skill, humor, and sound scholarship, Coote drags into the foreground a man whom history has carelessly consigned to the background.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-23929-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
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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