Literary travel meets history, laced with cartloads of trivia and endless good humor. Somewhere Tom Paine, scourge of kings...
The embodiment of revolution comes in for an appropriately anarchic—and wild, and thoroughly enjoyable—appreciation.
Fans of Mornington Crescent, a game of “complete and utter nonsense” that is more familiar to Brits than Americans, will be quite at home with blogger/editor/journalist/McSweeney’s regular Collins’s elegantly written but highly centrifugal treatment of what happened to Thomas Paine’s remains. “Any rube visiting Britain” is free to ask the rules of Mornington Crescent, observes Collins, but he is sure to be “methodically flummoxed with absurdly fake histories of the game and utter evasion as to its actual workings.” So it is with this masterpiece of misdirection, which opens at a gay bar in Manhattan on the site of which Paine died. A few beers later, Collins is chasing across the water, where William Cobbett, antinomian author of countless libertarian pamphlets, had spirited Paine’s bones. His skull a Yorick-like talisman for London radicals, Paine did yeoman service in the afterlife, but eventually, bits and pieces of his body went wandering off into the collections of vicars and natural philosophers—and as to just where, well, Collins asks and is flummoxed, and not just because all the high street house numbers have been changed since Georgian days. Confronted with failure, Collins takes delightful detours into the odd lives of the Victorian vegetarians and phrenologists and freethinkers who kept the Paine cult going as Paine himself was steadily forgotten in their day, a sad fate for an author whose Common Sense once sold second only to the Bible. The search takes Collins through dusty warrens and back alleys and rainy roads, all full of the promise of adventure; even a London bench “missing every single one of its slats” has a role in the great game that’s afoot.
Literary travel meets history, laced with cartloads of trivia and endless good humor. Somewhere Tom Paine, scourge of kings and conventions, is smiling.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-58234-502-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2005
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
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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