Zola had a knack for turbulence, both in his fiction and in his personal life. This lively account documents one of the most...
A chronicle of Émile Zola’s exile in England after the novelist’s involvement in the Dreyfus affair.
In 1894, French army captain Alfred Dreyfus was found guilty of passing military secrets to Germany, stripped of his rank, and sentenced to prison on Devil’s Island in French Guiana. Four years later, Zola argued for Dreyfus’ innocence in “J’Accuse,” an open letter to France’s prime minister that was published on the front page of the newspaper L’Aurore. Zola not only claimed that Dreyfus, who was Jewish, couldn’t have passed along the secrets, but he also accused the French army and government of corruption and anti-Semitism. When Zola was convicted of libel, fined 3,000 francs, and sentenced to a year in prison, he fled to a series of locations in London and the English countryside. In this well-researched history, Rosen (Children’s Literature/Goldsmiths, Univ. of London; What is Poetry?: The Essential Guide to Reading and Writing Poems, 2016, etc.), a British poet, broadcaster, and former Children’s Laureate, documents Zola’s activities while in England, which included working on the novel Fécondité, indulging his passion for photography, and, most painfully, writing home. Zola left behind his wife, Alexandrine, and his mistress, Jeanne Rozerot, the mother of his two young children, Jacques and Denise. Rosen draws from many sources, including the adult Denise’s memoirs and Zola’s many letters home, in which he expresses concerns over Jacques’ osseous tuberculosis and laments that he and Jeanne won’t be together for their 10th anniversary. Rosen digresses too often with unnecessary details about Zola’s family life, but the book is still a thoughtful examination of anti-Semitism and French jurisprudence in the late 19th-century. The author also tells his story with great wit, as when he writes that Zola cycled through villages so perfectly neat that he “wondered where the English hid their poor people.”
Zola had a knack for turbulence, both in his fiction and in his personal life. This lively account documents one of the most turbulent and consequential episodes of all.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-68177-516-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
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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