A minor but solid, very well-written contribution to the vast literature surrounding Teddy Roosevelt.
A storied family is broken apart by its patriarch’s devotion to war and the quest for honor.
As Burns (1920: The Year that Made the Decade Roar, 2015, etc.) recounts, Quentin Roosevelt, born in 1897, was both Theodore Roosevelt’s youngest son and the repository of a great deal of his hopes. Sickly like his father, though less inclined to make boastful declarations such as that he was “as strong as a bull moose,” Quentin emerged in boyhood as a fine young man with a distinct sense of noblesse oblige. In one sparkling moment in the book, he quietly reproaches a haughty society dame who asks how he can stand the “common boys” at his school: “My father says there are only four kinds of boys: good boys and bad boys and tall boys and short boys; that’s all the kinds of boys there are.” With less drive than his father, who champed to get into the fight against Spain in Cuba and blustered his way into a “big stick” foreign policy in the White House, Quentin joined the fledgling aviation corps under Eddie Rickenbacker and died in France—an event, Burns writes, for which his mother, Edith, had been preparing ever since her war-loving husband went off to battle and then instilled in his children, one by one, an obligation to go to war. That resolve ended in a spiritual gloom, “a shroud he would wear for the rest of his days.” Roosevelt’s story is of a piece with his friend Rudyard Kipling’s, whose life and work were overturned by the loss of his son in France in 1915. None of it will come as news to readers well versed in the life of Roosevelt—it figures, for instance, in Edmund Morris’ Colonel Roosevelt (2010)—but Burns finds special meaning and resonance in the father-son relationship, and his slender book makes for a fine homage.
A minor but solid, very well-written contribution to the vast literature surrounding Teddy Roosevelt.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-60598-951-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
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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