For die-hard Byron fans only.
A disappointing biography of the two most significant women in Byron’s life: wife Annabella and half-sister Augusta, who was also his lover.
Crane (Lord Byron’s Jackal, 1999) argues that Lady Byron and Augusta Leigh were bitter enemies because each made the mistake of loving the poster child for English Romanticism’s destructive tendencies. Byron seduced them both, then left both high and dry. In a sense, he married Annabella in 1815 to escape his incestuous passion for Augusta, but in fact he was happier flouting convention than living the married life, especially when that life involved responsibility for children and the mountain of debt he’d accumulated as a bachelor. Annabella realized early in their marriage that she was doomed to unhappiness, while Augusta distanced herself from the love of her life. Rumors of Byron’s affair with Augusta circulated at around the same time he left England for the continent, ruining both their reputations. Crane’s account of all this is competent enough until the narrative comes to a screeching and improbable halt smack in the middle with a fictional account of a meeting between the two women more than 25 years after Byron’s death. Although it serves the author’s purpose of clearly presenting Annabella and Augusta’s relationship of mingled animosity, love, and respect, this character development comes too late and offers too little. Written in an irritating script format composed only of dialogue and notes approximating stage directions, the interlude is stylistically intrusive and psychologically incredible. The restrained emotion and deep insights Crane attributes to both women are more annoying than persuasive, their dialogue is absurd: “You knew that, knew that even if he could escape your malice . . . then you could enjoy all the satisfaction of virtuous revenge,” intones Augusta. It’s hard to believe anyone ever talked in such a manner, even in the mid-19th century.
For die-hard Byron fans only.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-40648-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
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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