An average biography. Jane Dunn’s Daphne du Maurier and Her Sisters (2014) takes a more capacious and satisfying look at the...
A familiar portrait of the prolific British writer.
Fiction writer de Rosnay (A Paris Affair, 2015, etc.) claims that Daphne du Maurier’s novel Rebecca (1938) exerted an indelible influence on her work. When a friend suggested that she write the first French biography of du Maurier, she took on the challenge, deciding to follow in the writer’s footsteps in England and France to discover “the secrets of her life, her inspiration, her work.” De Rosnay offers only brief accounts of her travels, beginning at the Terraces, near Regent Park, where her subject was born; continuing to the village where the teenage Daphne went to boarding school and began an affair with her young headmistress; to the coast of Cornwall, where Daphne walked; to Menabilly, the writer’s beloved home and prototype of Manderley, where de Rosnay’s effort to visit was rebuffed; and to Kilmarth, her last home. All of these sites, though, hardly yielded secrets. Instead, de Rosnay draws largely on du Maurier’s autobiography, letters, and several fine biographies. She adds little to the already available material; this book’s distinction is its presentation in present tense, since de Rosnay aims to describe her subject “as if I were filming her, camera on my shoulder, so that my readers could instantly understand who she was.” This strategy, however, does not convey any more intimacy or revelation than a more conventional authorial voice. Besides chronicling her subject’s successful writing career, de Rosnay reprises her family life, marriage, motherhood, and contradictory sexuality. Homophobic, du Maurier denied that she was a lesbian, but as a child, she invented a male alter ego, Eric Avon, that she felt was her true identity. When she met the virile Tommy Browning, she “shivers” at the “masculine contact” of his kiss. She married him and relegated Eric to a box. He emerged, “sparkling and resplendent,” when she became infatuated with several women.
An average biography. Jane Dunn’s Daphne du Maurier and Her Sisters (2014) takes a more capacious and satisfying look at the life.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-09913-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
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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