Extremes: Reflections on Human Behavior

Fourteen essays explore extremes of human nature and behavior from medieval times to the twentieth century

In 14 highly entertaining, often provocative essays, Dutch cardiologist Dunning probes the extremes of human behavior. He contrasts two individuals burnt at the stake--saintly Joan of Arc, driven by hallucinated voices, and her contemporary, Gilles de Rais, a bestial mass murderer who sodomized and killed 150 boys. Dunning ponders how country lass Charlotte Corday, the picture of rosy innocence, cold-bloodedly stabbed to death mass executioner Jean-Paul Marat, symbol of the French Revolution's bloodthirstiness. An extraordinary gallery of geniuses, addicts, martyrs, criminals and lunatics, these gracefully written essays feature tormented composer Gustav Mahler discussing his marital problems with Sigmund Freud; blind Louis Braille inventing the alphabet named after him; French 17th-century saint Marguerite Marie, who had visions of Christ performing a heart transplant operation on her; and drunken poet Paul Verlaine shooting his friend Arthur Rimbaud. Other pieces discuss anorexia nervosa, the castrato's rise and fall in the opera world, the Battle of the Somme, unisexual lizards and virgin birth.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A kind of history of the heart by Dutch cardiologist Dunning, who takes us on a doctor's literary tour of that organ in extreme states. Some of Dunning's tyings together of humanity's involvement with the heart seem forced dilations that allow him to pour and mix his rich research at will. But chapter after chapter holds its own and gathers us into a state of mystical realism. One could hardly expect to find a tie between the burning of Joan of Arc and the hanging of sexual pervert and mass-murderer Gilles de Rais, who were contemporaries. But Joan's heart, it is said by one chronicler, survived her burning, and Gilles's heart was extracted before his hung corpse was placed upon a funeral pyre. Both pyres, Dunning says, ``flare up briefly in the darkness of the Middle Ages [and] represent the outer limits of human conduct.'' We follow the birth of the adoration of the Sacred Heart of Jesus through its origins with the French nun Marguerite Marie Alacoque, a religious anorexic who saw Jesus place her heart in his own empty chest-- which Dunning ties in with medical investigations of heart disease and heart transplants. His exploration of the diseased heart of Gustav Mahler--weak with streptococcal bacteria--gives Dunning his richest chapter, as he relates Mahler's compositions, his strained love life with Alma Mahler (half his age), and his visit to Freud for an analysis that revealed the source of Mahler's neurotic suffering as an artist: His most sublime melodies were forever being invaded by banal street tunes, a fact that Freud traced back to Mahler's childhood, his abused mother, and a street organ playing ``Ach, du lieber Augustin.'' Also discussed: Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson, Baudelaire's artificial paradise in absinthe, cannibalism in Poe, and much more. A brilliant unpacking of an extremely overfilled mind. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.