Sure to be hated by Harold Bloom and others who view any attempt to locate the Bard in history as blasphemy against the...
An intriguing addition to Shakespeare studies, stressing his immersion in the issues of his time.
Shapiro (English/Columbia Univ.) identifies 1599, when Shakespeare and his fellow shareholders built the Globe Theatre, as the pivotal year during which the 35-year-old playwright’s style changed and his ambitions grew as he wrote four new plays. He had already established a strong reputation with successful comedies and histories like A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Henry IV, but Shapiro contends that Shakespeare “was restless, unsatisfied with the profitably formulaic.” The departure from the Chamberlain’s Men of Will Kemp, the great comic who played Falstaff, signaled the playwright’s break with an older form of theater rooted in folk traditions. Falstaff was gone from Henry V, a drama poised on the knife’s edge between patriotism and cynicism that reflected contemporary spectators’ mixed feelings about an unpopular Irish war; fears of a Catholic plot to assassinate Queen Elizabeth fueled the Roman characters’ debates in Julius Caesar. With As You Like It, the Bard moved toward a mature view of love quite unlike his earlier “honey-tongued” romantic poetry. This productive year closed with Shakespeare drafting Hamlet, which transformed the monologue by using it to convey the interior workings of a character’s mind. Shapiro’s best chapters cogently analyze Shakespeare’s extensive revisions of Hamlet, which backed away from the first draft’s radical break with theatrical tradition and softened its dark, existential tone just enough to avoid alienating his audience. The book’s early sections, heavy on specific incidents in Elizabethan history, will not be to everyone’s taste, but they’re necessary to the author’s detailed and ultimately convincing argument that to appreciate Shakespeare as a genius for all ages, we must understand how his art addressed the concerns of his own.
Sure to be hated by Harold Bloom and others who view any attempt to locate the Bard in history as blasphemy against the religion of Pure Art, but open-minded readers will be stimulated and enriched by Shapiro’s contextual approach.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-008873-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2005
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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