A troubling, important assessment of Yeats’s life and work.
A cogent—and densely scholarly—political study by Dublin historian and librarian Mc Cormack that delves uneasily into Yeats’s flirtation with fascism and eugenics.
By the end of Yeats’s life, in early 1939, the great Irish poet and Nobel laureate was deeply disillusioned by the course of Irish politics, in which he had been active for decades. His group of friends, such as Maude Gonne and her pro-Nazi son-in-law Francis Stuart, were anti-Semites, and his own After Strange Gods (1934) is explicit in its hostility toward Jews, while the posthumously published On the Boiler (1939) is a methodical treatment of the politics of hatred. The first major poke at Yeats’s Brahmin status among intellectuals came about with Conor Cruise O’Brien’s 1965 essay “Passion and Cunning,” which exploded the poet’s fascist leanings and knocked him from the pedestal established in earlier biographies by Joseph Hone, Richard Ellmann and A.N. Jeffares. Mc Cormack works backward here, from the pall surrounding the poet’s death to the announcement of Yeats as co-winner of the Frankfurt Plakette award in honor of Goethe’s centenary in 1932, sanctioned by the new Nazi regime, and the German production of his play The Countess Cathleen in 1934, produced by SS commander Friedrich Bethge. The author even explores Yeats’s confusion over sexuality and politics after his vasectomy in 1935, when he was 70, a procedure that seemed to have restored his manly vigor. Moreover, Yeats was actively wooed by the Nazis, as the author notes: “His ‘mystical’ and folklore interests were manifestly compatible with their ideology.” Mc Cormack moves backward still into the “intrusive ghosts” of Augustan poets like Swift, who haunted the poet’s work and mindset, as well as the Victorian roots in engendering the twin motivating forces of the early-20th century—militarism and anti-Semitism. Mc Cormack has previously written on the Anglo-Irish literary tradition, and his writing is erudite and well-informed, though often murky to navigate. However, this is a significant study, cold-eyed and solidly researched.
A troubling, important assessment of Yeats’s life and work.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-7126-6514-5
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Pimlico/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
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
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