A sumptuous literary biography.
Revealing portrait of the noted—and notorious—writer, viewed through the prism of the books that educated, inspired and comforted him.
From birth, Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) was awash in words. His Anglo-Irish parents recounted aloud local tales, classic literature and their own work (Sir William was a pioneering folklorist, Lady Wilde “a famous poetess”), fostering both an early aptitude and undying love for language, writing and books. Wilde thrilled at collecting and devouring a variety of volumes; each added to his prodigious intellect as well as to a store of ideas that contributed to many a lush oration. His years at Oxford were marked by extravagant academic accomplishments, particularly in the classics he had loved since childhood, and by symposiums hosted with Socratic gusto in his school quarters. As an adult of growing notoriety, Wilde found sustenance, inspiration and solace in his prized library; he regarded the carefully collected books as both “a record of his life and as an emblem of his personality.” Wilde scholar Wright (editor: Oscar Wilde’s Table Talk, 2001), who spent 20 years reading this library, allows his own prose to convey his subject’s literary duality—excess and allusion. “Hubris had provoked the wrath of the Gods, and Doom entered the stage with running feet,” he writes of the guilty verdict in the infamous Queensbury trial, referring to the Greek tragedies that provided so much joy to Wilde the reader but also inescapably pervaded his life. In general, the author suggests, Wilde enjoyed “the pleasant confusion of life and art”—until his prison sentence forced him to become an actual tragic hero. At the start of his incarceration, all of his belongings, including his entire library, were sold at public auction to settle his debts. An “inconsolable” Wilde suffered the losses behind bars; he would never fully recover. The author accents this remarkable account with pages of Wilde’s reading lists, reproductions of annotated books and an index of referenced authors.
A sumptuous literary biography.Pub Date: May 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-8050-8993-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: John Macrae/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2009
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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