A well-reasoned transoceanic rejoinder to Joanne B. Freeman’s Affairs of Honor (2001), and a pleasure for fans of Aubrey and...
“Thank God, I have done my duty,” quoth Lord Nelson moments before expiring in 1805 at the Battle of Trafalgar. In this vivid study, Nicolson (God’s Secretaries, 2003) examines the weight of those words.
Horatio Nelson was a kindly man in a violent time, uncouth and simple; the wife of an admiralty lord thought that his general appearance “was that of an idiot”—and this from an admirer—but his foes knew better than to discount him for his looks, for at the turn of the 19th century he was renowned for his fleet-crushing abilities, his willingness to shed his own men’s blood to gain advantage, and his careful enunciation of the doctrine of annihilation. Nelson saw himself, writes Nicolson, as an agent of apocalypse and divine retribution; he lived at a time when varieties of millennial religion were sweeping across England, particularly among the working class that made up the Royal Navy, and he took his religious ideas seriously while seeing to it that his fleets were confident, aggressive, and, by 1805, “the most effective maritime killing machine in the world.” Against them stood a Spanish navy that, while not useless, was badly served by its officers and crown, and a French navy that was divided along lines of class, region and ideology, so much so that it found it hard to fulfill the functions of a marine force—namely, keeping itself alive and afloat and constantly killing the enemy, as the British were doing to them in a ratio of ten to one. Technology played its role, Nicolson observes, but ideas and beliefs were as central, and though Trafalgar was a tactical mess, British ideology and values kept the fleet moving even after poor Nelson fell to an enemy musket ball. “In other words,” writes Nicolson, “love, honor, zeal, and skill won the day.”
A well-reasoned transoceanic rejoinder to Joanne B. Freeman’s Affairs of Honor (2001), and a pleasure for fans of Aubrey and Hornblower.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-075361-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2005
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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