A fascinating depiction of the Victorian era that fails to capitalize on its most salient detail.
An intriguing if ultimately disappointing life of a 19th-century doctor who concealed his sexual identity while modernizing medicine in the British Empire.
Freud would have had a field day with James Barry. A fatherless dandy, he depended throughout his life on male protectors to smooth over the controversies sparked by his pugnacity. These older men helped him graduate from Edinburgh University and shielded him from enemies when he was a military doctor with postings around the globe. His detractors scored points, however, once accusing him of having a homosexual relationship with Lord Somerset, his boss in South Africa. After that scarring incident, Barry became a more colorful and abrasive character, seen always with a large black manservant and a little dog named Psyche. He also became such an egotist that one pungent anecdote here shows Barry scolding Florence Nightingale for not properly running a military hospital. Because he was so brilliant—he performed, for example, one of the first successful caesarean sections in modern history—higher-ups in the military always gave him a wide berth. Not until the very last chapters does British journalist Holmes start explaining exactly what Barry’s secret was. Then the reader suddenly connects the dots between Barry’s odd manners, his fascination with hernias, his work with sexually transmitted diseases, and his particularity in regard to living conditions. Employing a mystery writer’s device in a biography can be annoying, however, when the possible conclusion hasn’t been telegraphed earlier on. Here, the punch line comes completely out of the blue, undercutting all that came before. A pity, because Holmes weaves her tale well enough to hold the reader until then.
A fascinating depiction of the Victorian era that fails to capitalize on its most salient detail.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-50556-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2002
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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