She was, in the words of former Kirkus editor Barbara Bader—whose American Picturebooks Marcus quotes—"the first to make the writing of picturebooks an art." As founding editor of the innovative William R. Scott children's book line, as well as the author of about 100 picture books during her 15-year career, Brown (1910-52) was also, as Marcus (who reviews children's books for Parenting Magazine) sums up, as responsible as anyone for making the field of children's picture books "a vital creative enterprise in her time." Brown's two enduring classics, The Runaway Bunny (inspired by a medieval ProvenÇal love ballad) and the "hypnotic" Goodnight Moon (still going strong after 45 years and four million copies), were ignored by The Horn Book and the New York Public Library but helped win her a 1947 celebrity profile in Life. Marcus recounts how Brown found her calling while an intern at the experimental Bank Street School for child-development study and teacher training—and how, by Bank Street policy, the books she wrote and edited were approved or revised according to the responses of "the threes" or "the fives" (or other appropriate age groups) enrolled at the school. From published reports, Brown's considerable correspondence, and interviews with those who knew her, Marcus pieces together a picture of his subject's doubts and achievements and ambition to write for grown-ups; her offbeat homes and quirky persona; and her friend-filled but lonely life punctuated by a few short affairs and engagements, then an unhappy relationship with a difficult woman who called herself Michael Strange, and, finally, love and imminent marriage to a younger man, Pebbles Rockefeller—only to die after surgery at age 42. If Marcus doesn't bring Brown to scintillating life, he does give an honest and informative account, including intriguing sketches of Bank Street and of developments and personages in the children's book world of the time. And he does it without the sanctimonious reverence so endemic in his field.
Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1992
ISBN: 0688171885
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1991
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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