An admirable success at generating the sense of impending change that surrounded the death of Queen Victoria.
The final month of Queen Victoria’s reign, told in minute detail and set square within the flux of fin-de-siècle Britain, from countryman Rennell.
When Queen Victoria retired to Osborne House in January 1901 to die, the sun still rose everywhere on an outpost of the British Empire. But it was also a country on the doorstep of change, writes the author, much more so than was suggested by the fanfare that had accompanied the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee just four years earlier. The aristocracy ruled, yet socialism was in the air—and trade unions boasted a membership in the millions. Republicanism was on the march, and Germany and the US were industrially ascendant. Concern over the health of Victoria was on everyone’s lips, but more so was fear over the end of an age, for the queen embodied stability and continuity amid all the change. Rennell chronicles the moment-by-moment dwindling of the Queen, the gathering of the family, the apprehension of the populace, the arrival of her grandson the Kaiser of Germany (along with the intrigues the strained relations between Germany and Britain had to offer despite all the familial ties), the every ministration of her personal doctor, the absence of Albert and John Brown (Rennell even speculates on their sexual relationship; he gives it a thumb’s down). Then, after the death, all the circumstance that attended the funeral, from the color of the draping on the buildings to the coffin snafu to the wreath sent by the King of Portugal, “lilies and orchids on a cushion of violets”—Rennell doesn’t let an iota of minutiae escape. He is also quick to point out that upon Edward’s becoming king, the court exhaled a great breath of air, loosened the corset strings, and enjoyed laughter for the first time in over 60 years. Pretenses dropped, and frivolity took root.
An admirable success at generating the sense of impending change that surrounded the death of Queen Victoria.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-27672-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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