Carefully researched and sensitively written. Essential.
Neatly interlaced biography profiles a father of New England Transcendentalism and his bestselling daughter.
Bronson and Louisa May Alcott shared a birthday (November 29, 1799 and 1832 respectively) and died within 40 hours of each other in 1888. As Matteson (English/John Jay College) ably shows in his debut, their lives were inextricably intertwined, even during the occasional brief periods when they lived apart. After offering a snapshot of a low point in Bronson’s life, the 1837 auction of furniture, supplies and books from his beloved, failing Temple School, the narrative moves back to his birth on a Connecticut farm and proceeds chronologically thereafter. Young Bronson mystified his parents with his passion for reading. With little formal education, he traveled as a peddler before devoting the rest of his life to educating others—sometimes in schools, sometimes in lectures and “conversations,” sometimes in his writings. Matteson shows all facets of Bronson’s character: his fierce work ethic, his feckless financial ways (the Alcotts were perennially saved from ruin by the kindnesses of friends), his loyalty to his family. An early and ferocious opponent of slavery, he could be a remarkably clear thinker, but he was also clueless about his own foolishness and irresponsibility. Louisa, a tomboy with a temper, seemed at times the living refutation of her father’s genial theories about human development. In her childhood, she sat at the knees of Emerson, Thoreau and other Concord notables. While serving as a nurse during the Civil War, she became severely ill and was treated with a toxic, mercury-based medication that caused her much suffering and shortened her life. Matteson capably describes Louisa’s feverish devotion to her family and to her writing, the failures in love, the struggles to succeed that came to fruition with the publication of Little Women, her subsequent celebrity, travels and literary triumphs.
Carefully researched and sensitively written. Essential.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-393-05964-9
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2007
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
PERSPECTIVES
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