by Margaret Drabble ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 27, 1996
As with many ploddingly obese biographies, there is a thin, sprightly work here aching to be set free. Angus Wilson was one of the last gasps of breath in the British novel's slow, asymptotic death. In novels such as Anglo- Saxon Attitudes and The Middle Age of Mrs. Eliot, he combined the waspishness of Evelyn Waugh with the social commentary of E.M. Forster, adding a dash of baroque Firbankian campiness for good measure. Though he was one of England's first openly gay writers, his work is more concerned with the foibles and fallibilities of English society than specifically homosexual themes. A friend of the novelist's, Drabble seems concerned with returning him to his proper place in English literature. Like many of his characters, Wilson was a colorful personality, effortlessly erudite, a great talker, but his life was usually unremarkable: He lectured and went on long holidays. And Drabble (The Gates of Ivory, 1992, etc.) feels obliged to record it all. Right to the brink of parody, list follows list as she notes seemingly every party, conference, and dinner Wilson ever attended; she even throws in the occasional menu, as well. And why not detail Wilson's slightest jaunt—from a day trip to London to a grand Indian tour? At times it's more like reading an engagement calendar than a biography. The writing tends to be bloodless, enervated, but is redeemed somewhat by her novelist's insight into Wilson's psychology. She also writes with professional understanding of Wilson's money troubles, the ceaseless Faustian necessity of teaching, lecturing, attending conferences, reviewing books, all in order to stay afloat. Such is the sad, ironic state of literature these days, that when Wilson died in 1991, much honored, even knighted, he was practically penniless, and many of his books were out of print. Perhaps this biography, in its lumbering, cumbersome way, might bring a few of these elegant, streamlined, ever inventive works back to the bookstores.
Pub Date: May 27, 1996
ISBN: 0-312-14276-5
Page Count: 740
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1996
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by Elizabeth Taylor ; edited by Margaret Drabble
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by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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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PERSPECTIVES
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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