A concise, thoughtful, and well-researched biography.
A distinguished Dutch biographer’s account of the life of Allene Tew (1872-1955), who rose from middle-class obscurity to become one of America’s first socialites.
Born in Janesville, Wisconsin, but raised in Jamestown, New York, Tew was the only child of a bank clerk with rich relatives. Her free-spirited ways and taste for “pleasure [and] adventure” distinguished Tew from other girls of her time. At 18, she became involved with Tod Hostetter, the son of nouveau riche millionaire parents from Pittsburgh. Tew became pregnant out of wedlock and then married Hostetter, who she later discovered was addicted to gambling. She became a widow for the first time by age 30 and married again two years later, this time to a New York stockbroker named Morton Nichols. During their five-year marriage she earned a reputation as a “fantastic, inexhaustible organizer of…charity benefits.” By 1909, Tew was again independent and a major figure in New York society. She remarried in 1912, this time to a wealthy, self-made engineer named Anson Wood Burchard, whom van der Zijl characterizes as the one man out of the five she married who “genuinely loved her for herself.” Their marriage represented the happiest and saddest times in her life: During the time they were together, Tew lost both her children and her parents before losing Burchard in 1927. She went to Europe, where she scandalized American high society by marrying a German prince named Henrich Reuss, divorcing him, then marrying a Russian count 12 years her junior named Pavel Kotzbue. Now part of the European aristocracy, she helped broker what at first seemed an unlikely marriage between Princess Juliana of the Netherlands and a man of obscure aristocratic origin. Set against the tumultuous history of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, this biography is certainly entertaining, but it is also a fascinating story about a remarkable woman’s indomitable spirit and will to survive.
A concise, thoughtful, and well-researched biography.Pub Date: May 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5039-5183-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Amazon Crossing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
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
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
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