A useful addition to the growing body of critical studies of Peake.
An absorbing portrait of the dystopian, sometimes dyspeptic English author and illustrator.
Mervyn Peake (1911–68) is best known for his Gormenghast novels, the basis for a recent BBC television series. He is less known for his superb drawings and paintings, examples of which appear throughout this well-written biography. According to Yorke, who has written similar studies of other relatively obscure English artists, Peake led an almost stereotypically Edwardian childhood. Born in China to missionary parents, he endured public school (“He played for the Chalmers House first cricket XI between 1925 and 1928, but, according to the school magazine, ‘at the present is much too careless’ ”) and came of age in the depths of the Depression. After a bohemian period that included time in an artists’ colony on the island of Sark, Peake found work as an art teacher in London, where he fell in love with one of his students. Though Maeve Gilmore’s family opposed the union, the couple married and enjoyed a happy life together. Peake continued to work as an artist, securing commissions to illustrate children’s books and classics while working throughout the early 1940s on a novel called Titus Groan, which would become the first installment of the Gormenghast series. (Fans will appreciate learning that the novel does not take its name, as is often supposed, from Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus: “People forget that one of Peake’s favorite artists was Rembrandt, whose only son was called Titus.”) Discharged from the army on grounds of ill-health during WWII, Peake was sent to document the liberated Bergen-Belsen, where he made a haunting study of a girl dying of consumption. Afterward, Yorke writes, a gloom settled over Peake’s writings and drawings—but not necessarily the artist himself—that lasted until his death from Parkinson’s disease 20 years later.
A useful addition to the growing body of critical studies of Peake.Pub Date: June 22, 2002
ISBN: 1-58567-211-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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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