Despite indulging in such bombastic statements as, “all their angels are ages, and the ages held out a distant halo of...
The coincidence of a birthday shared by two titans of modern history yields an absorbing joint appreciation of the politics of emancipation, evolutionary science and their respective contributions to the world we know now.
Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were born on the same winter day in 1809. New Yorker contributor Gopnik (Through the Children’s Gate: A Home in New York, 2006, etc.) seizes that day to muse on the meaning of their lives and ours. Reworked from a pair of previously published essays, his pensive exegesis describes how humankind’s worldview was permanently altered by an iconic American’s upward mobility and a well-born Briton’s discerning and skeptical eye. By 1838, Darwin had come to his understanding of natural selection, and Lincoln had delivered his crucial Lyceum lecture. The sensitive observer and the astute lawyer each suffered the loss of a beloved child, a blow no less devastating for being a common one in the 19th century. Both were masters of rhetoric—spoken persuasion in Lincoln’s case, written inducement in Darwin’s—and their words changed our beliefs. They made us beholden to the future, declares Gopnik, as we once were only to the past. The rigors of democracy and science became part of civilization’s habit. Logic and fact, including the fact of death, did matter after all. The author aspires to philosophical flights as he considers the question of what precisely Edwin Stanton said at the Emancipator’s deathbed. Did he aver that Lincoln “belongs to the ages,” or “to the angels”? Perhaps both apply, writes Gopnik, since this world embraces both the mundane and the evanescent.
Despite indulging in such bombastic statements as, “all their angels are ages, and the ages held out a distant halo of angels,” this talented, skillful critic achieves considerable new, heartfelt depth.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-307-27078-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2008
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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