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
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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