Ably following his National Book Awardnominated biography of John Butler Yeats (Prodigal Father, not reviewed), Murphy creates a detailed portrait of the Yeats family that establishes it as one rivaling the Jameses for genius. ``We are not a normal family,'' confessed Yeats once to a correspondent, understating the matter. Most of the poet's biographers underestimate his family in regard to his own mythopoetic personality. His father was a brilliant conversationalist and a barrister turned bohemian painter; his elder sister, Susan (Lily), a talented embroiderer and textile designer; his younger sister, Elizabeth (Lollie), a skilled printer; and his brother, Jack, a superb painter with an international reputation. When John Butler Yeats moved his family from Ireland to London to start his painting career, his children lost their idyllic Sligo home, but Murphy stresses how this experience of straitened means and family isolation nonetheless contributed to the development of their talents. Willie and Lily grew closer and entered into William Morris's poetic and decorative household, and Lollie learned art instruction and printing. While Willie established himself as a poet with the likes of George (A.E.) Russell, Lady Gregory, and Ezra Pound, his sisters formed the Cuala Industries, where Lollie's press brought out editions of Willie and his Celtic twilight compatriots and where Lily's designs generated a stir. As Murphy makes clear with a round-up of family feuding, the Yeatses' dispositions drew unequally from both sides of their Anglo-Irish heritage: Willie, for all his dreaminess, would haughtily direct the publishing project at Cuala (which he kept afloat financially), thus infuriating the egocentric Lollie, who in turn would bear down on her sister and Cuala partner, while Jack, working apart, became the most reserved of the siblings. Murphy, if neglecting the wider artistic developments of the Irish revival around them, exhaustively chronicles the family's multifaceted creative personalities. (101 illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-8156-0301-0
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Syracuse Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1994
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.
