An informed and sympathetic portrait of a troubled mind and humble heart. (32 illustrations, not seen)
Another deft portrait (see The Devil Kissed Her, p. 680) of the woman who murdered her mother and later joined with better-known brother Charles to write Tales from Shakespeare.
Hitchcock (Coming About, 1998, etc.) dives into a deep and rich sea teeming with literary life. Problem is, though, that once you begin writing about the Lambs, well, here come Coleridge (their dear friend) and Wordsworth and Hazlitt and Godwin and Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley. And once you mention Claire Clairmont (as the author does), then lubricious Lord Byron also swims among this vast school of Romantics, all of whom seem to have corresponded with one another, many of whom kept diaries. How to keep the focus on talented and mad—if often demure—Mary Lamb (1764–1847), with all these other fascinating creatures splashing nearby, clamoring for attention? Hitchcock manages quite well. Although she takes numerous glances elsewhere (how can she not?), she proceeds in steady, professional fashion to tell Mary’s story, revealing a knowledge of the major biographies of the principal Romantics and of the correspondence and writings of Charles and Mary. She imagines a rather sensational reenactment of the murder—a flash of a knife in the Lambs’ kitchen in 1796, excused by a coroner’s inquest as an act of patent lunacy. After time in a madhouse, Mary eventually joined her brother Charles for what would be the rest of their lives. Born into the servant class, the Lambs rose into the middle class by virtue of their pens (and Charles’s reliable labors for the East India House), finding their niche in a circle that included most of the literary luminaries of the age. Mary periodically returned to the madhouse for weeks and months, slipping into virtually permanent twilight after her brother’s death in 1834. Hitchcock persuades us that she was a major contributor to the Lambs’ literary creations.
An informed and sympathetic portrait of a troubled mind and humble heart. (32 illustrations, not seen)Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-393-05741-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2004
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
