An elegant, well-wrought, and objective biography of a complex but relentlessly unlikable figure. Posterity's picture of Evelyn Waugh has memorialized his frankly piggish demeanor as much as his elegant, barbed prose, and Hastings's sympathetic yet clear-sighted appraisal is likely to leave such impressions intact. Having broken free early from the stifling conventionality of an Edwardian childhood that is deftly sketched by Hastings (Nancy Mitford, 1986), Waugh liberated himself at public school and Oxford into his lifelong traits of snobbery, selfishness, barely veiled misogyny, and reactionism. Waugh's mundane origins notwithstanding, he managed to reinvent himself with spectacular success as spokesman for England's gilded nobility; hence one of the major satisfactions of any life of Waugh is the evocation of a vanished world of privilege. Hastings sets about this task with aplomb, bringing expertly to life personalities from Waugh's expansive acquaintance, famous (including Cyril Connolly and Nancy Mitford) and obscure (such as Alastair Graham, the ``original'' of Brideshead's Sebastian Flyte), in a series of vivid pen-portraits that delineate both their relationship to Waugh and how he represented—or as often misrepresented—them in his own writing. Hastings gives a full and revealing picture of Waugh's midlife conversion to Catholicism and the decisive impact this had on his subsequent self-image and work; her analysis of the sources and merits of Waugh's writing, too, is insightful and judicious. In the end, however, perhaps the strongest impression left by this biography is of a writer who like no other great (or nearly great) artist was possessed of so little basic human sympathy. (63 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: April 19, 1995
ISBN: 0-395-71821-X
Page Count: 724
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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