An extraordinary, fascinating set of firsthand accounts from the revolutionary era.
Poignant documents on the collapse of an old world, mixed with learned commentary: an outstanding work of history.
Isaac (Emeritus, History/La Trobe Univ., Australia) works an annaliste’s dream trove: a set of notebooks kept by a Virginia planter named Landon Carter, a devotee of “habitual diarizing,” who progressed from making cribnotes on parliamentary procedure and agricultural observations to recording wounded personal feelings and grievances against the English crown alike—or, as Isaac nicely puts it, from recording the tumults of the larger world to recording “rebellions in his own little kingdom.” Carter’s troubles are many: his daughter has eloped with the man he has forbidden her to see, and she despises her father because he will not share his fortune with the newlyweds (“I will contrive that she shall not want for Personal necessities, but I will give nothing that either Reuben or his inheritors shall claim”); his son has taken to acting out; his neighbors are saying slanderous things about him; and worse, at the dawn of the American Revolution, his slaves are constantly conspiring against him, and not without reason. As Isaac’s narrative opens, eight of those slaves have stolen a gun, “took my grandson Landon’s Bag of bullets and all the Powder, and went off in my Petty Auger canoe” to sign up with royal governor Lord Dunmore, who has offended planters up and down the Chesapeake Bay with the promise that runaway slaves who joined his Royal Ethiopian Regiment would be granted their freedom. Carter, a learned man fond of reading and quoting from Tristam Shandy, has plenty more difficulties, suspects the world of conspiring against him, and seems well on the way to becoming a cranky old man save for his enthusiasm for the rebel cause. Isaac’s surrounding commentary is intelligent and useful, though old Carter is quite able to speak for himself—and does so, grumpily but affectingly.
An extraordinary, fascinating set of firsthand accounts from the revolutionary era.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-19-515926-8
Page Count: 402
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2004
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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