A delightful opportunity to get in touch with your inner loser. (16-page b&w photo insert)
Debut author Collins dissects the fickle fortunes of fame with 13 vignettes of men and women who dared to dream but failed to achieve.
What happens to the schemers and the dreamers whose plans lose their moorings in reality, whose theories do not quite jibe with actuality? Collins introduces us to a medley of such unfortunate souls, including the eponymous John Banvard. This true visionary created “moving panoramas,” an artistic innovation in which he claimed to scroll three miles of canvas before his audience’s unbelieving eyes; the resulting hullabaloo made him the star of the 19th-century art world until he was upstaged by master huckster P.T. Barnum. Now fallen into outright obscurity, Banvard serves as Collins’s leading exemplar of fame gone wrong, of early successes dashed by unlucky combinations of bad timing, bad luck, and bad judgment. The reader also meets such obscure figures as playwright and Shakespearean plagiarist William Henry Ireland, John Cleves Symmes (who attempted to prove that the earth is hollow and inhabited on the inside), Professor Rene Blondlot (discoverer of the non-existent N-rays—similar to X-rays but, well, nonexistent), Ephraim Bull (who lost out to Thomas Welch in the race to cash in on Concord grapes), and A.J. Pleaston (who recommended growing plants and healing humans with the salubrious effects of blue light). These unfortunates, as well as the others Collins has dug up from obscurity, made noble attempts to change the world for the better and failed miserably. One might quibble with some of Collins’s selections for inclusion (some of the failures are not nearly as spectacular as the others), but the joy of the lot lies in contemplating the whims of fortune and the foolhardiness of humanity, while delighting in Collins’s crisp prose and engaging storytelling.
A delightful opportunity to get in touch with your inner loser. (16-page b&w photo insert)Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-26886-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2001
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
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
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