Carretta (English/Univ. of Maryland; Equiano, the African, 2005) returns with an examination of the life of a woman of whom little is known but whom the author and literary history have crowned as the mother of African-American literature.
The author struggles mightily to add flesh to the skeletal structure of Phillis Wheatley’s (1753–1784) story. He tells us about the slave ship that brought her, when she was about 7, from Africa, as well as some general history about the Wheatleys, who purchased her then freed her at the urging of her supporters in England, where she had published her only volume, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, in 1773. Carretta supplies as much as he can about her life before she began writing, the effects of her poetry, her minor celebrity in England (where her volume earned some respectful but sometimes patronizing reviews; scholars have found no American reviews) and her relationships with George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Paul Jones and others. The author also discusses the man she later married, John Peters, whose financial troubles might have caused her virtual disappearance for a few years near the end of her life. She floated proposals for a second volume of verse, but circumstance denied her. Carretta speculates that she might have had a better life if she had stayed in England, where she traveled with a Wheatley on business in 1773. In London, she discovered an intellectual and personal freedom unknown to those of her race (and gender) in America. But too often the slim record forces Carretta to employ words like probably and likely, to substitute historical and cultural backgrounds for biographical fact and to tell us about other people only tangentially involved. Even this most resolute, thorough excavation cannot uncover what is no longer there. Still, this is the most complete biography available, and no one is likely to find out much more of consequence about Wheatley.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8203-3338-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
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 2026 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.
