A readable, balanced portrait of a great humanist.
Prolific English biographer White (Leonardo, 2000, etc.) delineates in lively fashion the less than saintly life of the Christian apologist, children’s author, Luddite, and fuddy-duddy Oxford don.
Best known for his Chronicles of Narnia, a charming allegorical adventure disguising a complex Christian hierarchy, Lewis was first and foremost a scholar of medieval and Renaissance English literature, a tutor at Oxford for most of his life, and a drinking comrade of fellow don J.R.R. Tolkien and their disputatious group of Inklings. Born Clive Staples in 1898 to middle-class Protestant parents in Belfast, young Jack (as he was known) enjoyed an insular fantasy world with his older brother until their mother’s death when he was nine. Privately tutored to enter Oxford during WWI, he made a deathbed promise to take care of a soldier friend’s mother, which turned into a 30-year relationship with Janie Moore, estranged but never divorced from her husband and a good 20 years Lewis’s senior. White offers opinionated speculation on “Mother,” as Lewis called her, with whom he lived at his Oxford home and about whom he never spoke openly; despite Lewis’s Evangelical disciples who insist it was a platonic mother-son relationship, White reminds us that “apart from his brilliance, Jack Lewis was a man like any other.” A late bloomer as a writer, Lewis began tapping into his childhood fantasy world in 1938 with the Ransom series, followed by The Screwtape Letters (correspondence between two devils) and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, which in 1950 inaugurated the seven-volume Narnia series. White impishly refutes the portrait of Lewis as “St. Jack of Oxford,” frankly discussing his religious orthodoxy, elitism, and antimodernism in all forms, as well as his eyebrow-raising later liaison with American pen pal Joy Gresham. A previous biographer of Tolkien, the author also offers a thorough look at the crucial support and influence each writer had on the other’s work.
A readable, balanced portrait of a great humanist.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7867-1376-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2004
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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