A solid biography that should introduce more readers to Leigh Fermor’s work.
A fondly admiring account of the English wayfarer captures his enormously infectious spirit.
An author of nonfiction travelogues not well-known on this side of the Atlantic, Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915–2011) made his swashbuckling reputation during World War II when he and his fellow British Special Operations Executive agent W. Stanley Moss and Cretan resistance fighters abducted the Nazi general of the occupation of Crete. Subsequently, Leigh Fermor was hailed as a Greek hero and was even graced by a 1957 Hollywood film version of the escapade, Ill Met by Moonlight, based on Moss’ memoir of the same name. British author Cooper (Writing at the Kitchen Table: The Authorized Biography of Elizabeth David, 2000, etc.) was well-acquainted with the personable, loquacious Leigh Fermor and has edited his Words of Mercury, deriving much of this material from his own extensive memoirs as well as from interviews. What emerges here is the energetic, devouring spirit of the intrepid traveler, who never had the money to be a true bon vivant but who managed to find plenty of well-connected ladies to pay his bills. Channeling a restive youth between ill-suited parents who lived, separately, in India and London, “Paddy” resolved to postpone entry into the army in order to make a yearlong trek by foot through Europe starting in December 1933. It would prove his education, coming-of-age and entree into life as he forged many of the acquaintances that would direct his future, such as that of Princess Balasha Cantacuzene, a mysterious older painter of Greek-Rumanian extraction who took young Paddy in during the next several years. The war scattered many friends, yet his notoriety prompted continual interest in his travels.
A solid biography that should introduce more readers to Leigh Fermor’s work.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-59017-674-0
Page Count: 480
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2013
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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