Occasionally displays the author’s characteristic acerbity—but generous to a fault.
A generous, even admiring, biography of the late English poet laureate (1906–84) known for his sing-songy verse (some call it doggerel), his BBC broadcasts, his devotion to the Church of England (despite his unconventional private life) and his determination to save England’s notable older buildings from the wrecking ball.
The prolific Wilson—novelist (My Name Is Legion, 2005, etc.), biographer (Jesus: A Life, 1992, etc.), social historian (After the Victorians, 2005, etc.)—found himself in the news recently when it was revealed that he included in the UK edition of Betjeman a bogus letter (planted by a rival?); the first letters of the sentences in the middle of the letter combine to spell A.N. Wilson is a shit. Betjeman himself would have laughed at the puckishness—but disagreed with the nasty sentiment, for no one could ask for more sympathetic treatment than Wilson has given the poet. Wilson argues that about 30 of Betjeman’s 200 or so published poems “actually hit their mark.” And the author casts a most compassionate light on Betjeman’s intimate relationships. He was married in the 1930s (to Penelope Chetwode) and sired two children, but he also had numerous affairs, including one of some 30 years’ duration with Elizabeth Cavendish. The pudgy poet teetered back and forth between wife and mistress like a tawdry teddy bear. Betjeman did have a remarkably charmed life. One of his secondary-school teachers was T.S. Eliot; his tutor at Oxford was C.S. Lewis (they disliked each other intensely). His little boat eventually floated into some of the most exclusive social waterways—he attended the wedding of Princess Margaret, hung out with celebrities of all sorts. Wilson properly credits Betjeman for his pioneering work with the BBC (early on, he saw and exploited the potential of television) and with the fledgling architectural preservationist movement. Absent here is something essential: a chronology of the poet’s life with a list of his published titles.
Occasionally displays the author’s characteristic acerbity—but generous to a fault.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-374-11198-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2006
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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