In spite of the intent to charm, Trefusis's collection of observations, anecdotes, and aphorisms—hitherto published only in England, in 1952—reveals again that deeply disturbed and disturbing personality that appeared in Echo (1990), the autobiographical novel of the author's romance with Vita Sackville- West. ``Places make me happy,'' Trefusis complained, and ``people make me miserable''—which accounts for her annoying mannerism of personifying countries (``France is cerebral, Italy sensuous, Spain passionate'') and objectifying people (hair ``the color of potato chips''). To her complaint, her husband replied, ``Come off it!...[Stop] strutting about in front of the looking glass.'' Trefusis, the rich, restless, frivolous daughter of a royal mistress, records the first 50 years of the 20th century as merely a reflection in her personal mirror, with herself—her trivialities, opinions, and prejudices—at the center: During an interview with Mussolini, one of the most feared and powerful men in the world, she dropped her purse and, she claims, as he crawled about the floor picking up her lipstick, love letters, and cigarettes, they discussed the personality of the French—by which she means the urban upper class she identifies with. Occasionally, Trefusis shares the scene with some of her seemingly empty-headed friends—Emerald Cunard, Sybil Colfax—and her favorite author, Nancy Mitford. But, above all, Trefusis admires her mother, whose cruelty to strangers she offers as an example of wit: to an old Jewess crying during an air raid, Trefusis's mother said, ``Madam, this is not the Wailing Wall.'' Air raids, casualties, the deprivations of others—all disappear behind the ``gaiety'' of war in London, a minor inconvenience to Trefusis, cutting off her access to French cosmetics. She is, as Quennell says, a ``mythomaniac,'' an inventor, but a very unpleasant one, like the irrelevant, slightly grotesque ``decorative'' line drawings scattered throughout.
Pub Date: May 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-670-84067-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1992
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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