An imaginative voyage to the undiscovered country in company with a master mariner. (16 pp. color illustrations, not seen)
A re-sifting and re-imagining of the Shakespeare evidence in an attempt to discover how the Stratford lad became the celebrated poet and playwright.
Greenblatt (Humanities/Harvard; Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World, 1991) begins and ends with the acknowledgement that there will probably never be definitive answers to our most fundamental questions about Shakespeare, for the world’s most luminous writer left no personal writing at all—no letters, diaries, manuscripts. So scholars are left to infer the writer’s external life from assorted legal documents and his internal one from his creations. Even a renowned scholar like Greenblatt, who has an encyclopedic knowledge of Elizabethan England, of Shakespeare’s material world, of his literary works and who has a capacious imagination equal to the task of writing the life of someone who died 400 year ago—even such a scholar must populate his paragraphs with those vague characters named Seems and Probably. That said (and Greenblatt, to his credit, says it more than once), this is a remarkably informative and enlightening look at Will Shakespeare. Greenblatt speculates that the young man, charmed by the touring player companies that visited the region, left home (and wife and child) to pursue his alluring dream. Greenblatt examines in the Bard’s work the many allusions to the countryside, to leather craft (after all, he was a glover’s son), and even to Roman Catholicism, the religion his queen had outlawed but that his father could not surrender. Greenblatt describes Shakespeare as a sort of hybrid chameleon and sponge: He could find a way to fit with any group and could absorb from it the language and practices that later gave his plays such verisimilitude. Greenblatt also offers new ways to view the Bard’s strange epitaph, to understand the mysterious motives of Hamlet, Iago, and Lear. He ignores Oxfordian conspiracy theories and speculates that Shakespeare retired to be with his beloved daughter Susanna.
An imaginative voyage to the undiscovered country in company with a master mariner. (16 pp. color illustrations, not seen)Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2004
ISBN: 0-393-05057-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 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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