De Waal’s poetically recounted journey is a revelation, as well: of the power of obsession and the lust for purity.
A lyrical melding of art history, memoir, and philosophical meditation.
Ceramic artist de Waal (The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss, 2010, etc.) is obsessed with white porcelain, “thin as silver…white as driven snow,” a material so exceptional that it invites comparison to “smoke coiling up from a chimney, or from incense on an altar, or mist from a valley.” Porcelain gets its quality from two kinds of mineral: petunse, a fairly common stone, which yields amazing translucence and hardness; and the rarer kaolin, a soft, white earth that imparts plasticity. In short passages of allusive, radiant prose, the author chronicles his journeys in search of both the materials and the history of porcelain, discovering along the way men as obsessed as he. In 14th-century China, the Yongle emperor coveted porcelains of the purest white—“white as transcendence,” de Waal writes—with finely drawn decorations under a lucent glaze. In 17th-century France, Louis XIV built the Trianon de Porcelaine, filled with Delft imitations until a porcelain industry began in Rouen, Saint-Cloud, and Limoges. In early-18th-century Germany, Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus, “philosopher and mathematician and observer of how the world changes,” pursued his investigations in Dresden’s Goldhaus, a laboratory for natural philosophers and alchemists. In Cornwall, the Quaker William Cookworthy and the enterprising Wedgwoods perfected porcelain manufacture. Shockingly, in 1940, the Allach Porcelain Factory moved to Dachau, where inmates made figurines beloved by Nazis. Amassing a cache of kaolin, each with idiosyncratic properties, de Waal created an installation of 2,455 porcelain pots, glazed in white. For the author, white has mystical resonance: “White is truth; it is the glowing cloud on the horizon that shows the Lord is coming. White is wisdom….White brings us all into focus….It reveals. It is Revelation itself.”
De Waal’s poetically recounted journey is a revelation, as well: of the power of obsession and the lust for purity.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-374-28926-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
PERSPECTIVES
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