It is unimaginable that any life of Cooper will surpass this fascinating book.
The second volume of a majestic biography covers the 19th-century author’s most productive decades.
In 1826, Cooper (1789-1851) and his family sailed to Europe, where they traveled for the next seven years before returning to America in 1833. Franklin (English/Univ. of Connecticut; James Fenimore Cooper: The Early Years, 2007, etc.) begins his engrossing, sharply perceptive narrative with this sojourn, which proved crucial in shaping Cooper’s artistic aims, professional identity, and political views for the next quarter century. Despite recent successes, the author of The Last of the Mohicans, published just before he left America, was never certain that literature was a viable means of support, and Franklin focuses on Cooper’s ongoing efforts to manage the complex and often stressful business of writing. He provides a rich personal, cultural, and political context for all of Cooper’s work, including plans that never came to fruition. Cooper could be a difficult man—“urbanity is not his forte,” one acquaintance remarked—and his opinions on politics and religion incited some virulent responses. A staunch defender of the American republic against European detractors, Cooper evolved into a critic of what he saw as oligarchic values: “money is a bad foundation for power,” he announced. While in Europe, wounded by critical attacks in the press, Cooper announced that he was giving up writing fiction entirely. But he did not: he needed the income, Franklin says, and the rhythm of his life revolved around writing. Moreover, he had become so deeply “a fixture of the national imaginary” that his countrymen “would not consent” to his giving up. Prolific and apparently tireless, he incorporated political critique into many of his later novels. Even as the literary marketplace changed, Cooper “remained a vital force.” Franklin’s erudition is astonishing: his sources afford him an intimacy that is rare in any biography, and yet his voice is modest and even speculative at times. He does not pretend to know more than what is possible. Nevertheless, this is a masterful biography that well deserves to be called definitive.
It is unimaginable that any life of Cooper will surpass this fascinating book.Pub Date: April 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-300-13571-8
Page Count: 832
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
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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