Solid if never thrilling—a shame, given the inherently fascinating nature of the subject.
A noteworthy victim of the Inquisition—not altogether innocent, but a victim all the same—earns homage in this slender, somewhat unsatisfying biography.
Giordano Bruno came of age at a time when the papacy was desperately seeking to retain power and much of Europe was desperately seeking to step free of it. “Super-intelligent and vastly erudite,” as science journalist White (Acid Tongues and Tranquil Dreamers, 2001, etc.) cheerfully puts it, Bruno got himself into trouble with Church authorities while a novice seminarian; ratted on by a fellow student, he was caught reading Erasmus in the privy and summarily excommunicated. For the next 20-odd years, then, he wandered from one European capital to another, living off his wits and the largesse of reform-minded nobility. Bruno was never quite a Protestant—he examined Luther’s doctrines and found them wanting, and he could find no safe haven in Calvinist lands, where a fellow Catholic dissident had been slowly roasted on suspicion of heresy—but, especially after he began poking in Gnostic texts, he was never quite redeemable as a lapsed Catholic, either. All of which makes it a deeply curious turn of history that Bruno decided to return to Italy in the hope of mending fences with the “relatively liberal” Pope Clement VIII, who, though interested in Bruno as an intellectual specimen, nonetheless allowed the Inquisitors to have their way with him. And so they did, as White writes, torturing Bruno for six years and then burning him at the stake in Rome’s Campo dei Fiori. White’s account of these events is marred by a considerable amount of hedging and guesswork—understandable, given that the Church’s records of Bruno’s imprisonment have disappeared—and by a tendency to dumb down Bruno’s doctrines (as well as to overlook key texts such as the Cabala of Pegasus). Still, he does a good job of placing Bruno’s revolt in the freethinking context of the time, of showing the injustice of Bruno’s fate, and even of showing the relevance of Bruno’s ideas to the subsequent development of higher mathematics.
Solid if never thrilling—a shame, given the inherently fascinating nature of the subject.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-06-018626-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2002
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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