A penetrating, engrossing biography of a literary giant.
A masterful life of the prolific playwright, novelist, statesman, and poet who defined German romanticism.
After the production of his play Götz, 24-year-old Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) soared to fame throughout Germany, “a new star in the literary firmament,” a genius acclaimed for his “earthy, powerfully visceral tone” and “liberation from the conventional rules.” The following year, he wrote The Sorrows of Young Werther in a three-month burst of creative energy, drawing on the “stormy” romantic turmoil in his own life. Safranski, biographer of Friedrich Schiller, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Friedrich Nietzsche, among others, brings sensitivity and authority to a sweeping chronicle of Goethe’s life, drawing liberally from the writer’s autobiography and correspondence as well as other contemporary sources. The author has made the unusual decision to incorporate Goethe’s own words in italics rather than introducing quotations, resulting in a seamless, flowing narrative that foregrounds Goethe’s perspective while still offering a rich historical, philosophical, and artistic context. In a preface, conclusion, and two brief essays that punctuate the biography, Safranski pauses for reflection on Goethe’s work, relationships, state of mind, and intellectual interests, which included mysticism, alchemy, nature, and the existence of God. The young Goethe was influenced by Johann Gottfried Herder, already a famous writer although only five years older than his new friend. Goethe’s “candor, eagerness to learn, self-confidence, unself-consciousness, inventiveness, and playful and carefree nature” charmed Herder; for his part, Goethe was enchanted with the iconoclastic thinker whom Safranski likens to “a German Rousseau.” Later influences included Spinoza, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Byron, the Sturm und Drang writers who passed through Weimar, and Schiller, with whom he collaborated on plays. Prominent are his many passionate love affairs, often with married women, that fueled his work. Safranski places his sister among those women, noting “an erotic edge to their relationship.” Throughout, the author ably elucidates Goethe’s works, emphasizing the significance of Faust as a herald of modernism.
A penetrating, engrossing biography of a literary giant.Pub Date: May 16, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-87140-490-9
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
