Thickly footnoted and thoughtful, this 200th birthday tribute to the great writer makes for rewarding if sometimes arduous...
Like a character in one of his own fairy tales, Hans Christian Andersen almost magically transformed himself from penniless street urchin to one of Europe's most celebrated authors. Here, a scholarly, penetrating biography proves that Andersen’s life also had much of the Dickens novel in it.
“What a mystery I am to myself!” Andersen once wrote. That mystery was in part self-created. The author spent a lifetime running from a childhood of squalor and hardship. (In his own autobiographies, he suppressed the fact that his aunt and grandmother were prostitutes and that his alcoholic mother died in a poorhouse hospital just a few miles from where the 28-year-old author was then living comfortably.) Best remembered for children’s tales like “Thumbelina,” “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” “The Little Mermaid” and “The Ugly Duckling,” the prolific writer composed more than 30 volumes of literary works, including novels, plays and poetry. Now, a biographer intelligently examines these, along with Andersen’s voluminous correspondence, to create a compelling portrait of both the author and of the world he traveled in. Andersen is revealed as a man who was self-centered, vain and emotionally needy, yet possessed of a childlike wonder and innocence. Tall, awkward and generally unattractive physically (“The Ugly Duckling,” like much of his writing, was clearly autobiographical), Andersen was a confirmed bachelor who doggedly remained a virgin his entire life. That’s not to say he didn’t fall in love. He pursued many platonic affairs, more often with men than women. And his critics, including the Danish Soren Kierkegaard, were not above attacking Andersen for his “effeminate, unmanly” ways and for writings that often centered on platonic romance between men. Nevertheless, Andersen was an unstoppable force, both as author and celebrity. His wanderlust took him on 30 extended tours of Europe during his 70 years, and he was toasted everywhere.
Thickly footnoted and thoughtful, this 200th birthday tribute to the great writer makes for rewarding if sometimes arduous reading.Pub Date: April 5, 2005
ISBN: 1-58567-642-X
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
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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