An impressive portrait of a “busy, daring, and eventful life,” profoundly independent and intellectual, though also...
British novelist and poet Roe (The Spitfire Factory, not reviewed, etc.) pens a well-tempered, bracing biography of the painter too often trivialized as Augustus John's sister or Auguste Rodin's lover.
Working from letters in the Musée Rodin, the Tate Archives, the New York Library, and private collections, Roe takes John (1876–1939) out of the shadows into which, it begins to seem, she has been willfully put by others. Far from being the wimpy recluse of art-history tradition, John was an important, respected, and active member of the art community in Paris during a particularly vibrant era. Emotionally, she was vulnerable: her broken affair with Rodin threw her sideways for some time, she tended to confuse “devotional love with emotional yearning,” and she displayed a “chronic need for approval of her work.” But artistically and socially she was fulfilled: her work was admired by contemporaries (including her brother); neighbors and friends included poet Rainer Maria Rilke, critic Arthur Symons, and Irish nationalist Maud Gonne. Roe builds a supple and rolling narrative from the correspondence, striving for accuracy in presentation and keeping the speculation to a minimum as she tracks John through her years in France and numerous close friendships. The author also does a smart, unadorned job of following John's evolution as a painter, from her animated early works, with their interiorist tones, to the later oblique paintings, with their misshapen subjects. A very recognizable and human picture of John emerges as a searcher for faith and love quite like Roe's description of one of her letters: “portentous, eerie, with a sustained mood of beauty in strangeness.”
An impressive portrait of a “busy, daring, and eventful life,” profoundly independent and intellectual, though also melancholic.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-374-11317-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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
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