An extensively researched academic resource that will appeal to scholars and students of the Gilded Age.
A biography of a Northeastern high-society couple of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Larz and Isabel Anderson’s marriage united two families of incredible wealth, political connections, and social prestige. She was born Isabel Weld Perkins and groomed for society life; she loved the outdoors and later became a prolific writer. He was an ambitious young man who became a diplomat and served a short term as the U.S. ambassador to Japan. They traveled the world, taking 75 trips together during their marriage; hobnobbed with royalty; and spent millions of dollars. Moskey (The Turkish Ambassador’s Residence and the Cultural History of Washington D.C., 2013, etc.) focuses on their residences in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and the District of Columbia, effectively demonstrating how each home represented a different part of the Andersons’ lives, from their very private existence inside the walls of their Brookline mansion to the public gatherings that they hosted at their Dupont Circle domicile. The text is well-researched with ample notes, which gives it credence but also lends it a rather academic air. Larz kept journals and Isabel penned works that featured aspects of their relationship; they also documented house parties in their “dinner books,” and newspapers regularly reported on his career moves and her clothing choices. Thanks to the volume and diversity of primary source material, Moskey brings to light the profound affection in Larz and Isabel’s marriage in addition to the more public accounts of their activities and travels. Larz is shown to have missed his wife deeply when they were apart (“I felt terribly lonely without her to take care of me”), and his lighthearted journal entry about a moonlit sleigh ride in Brookline is delightful. The book’s focus remains firmly in the world of the white upper class, but Moskey mentions servants in several passages and addresses Larz’s racist attitudes. The account ends with Larz’s and Isabel’s deaths; curiously, though, the author doesn’t address their childlessness, which contributed to the tragic dismantling of their estate.
An extensively researched academic resource that will appeal to scholars and students of the Gilded Age.Pub Date: April 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4917-8875-2
Page Count: 258
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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