A sympathetic, well-rounded complement to Robert Caro’s monumental biography-in-progress.
Lyndon Johnson was the architect of his own downfall, as this sprawling biography shows.
Who knew that at the instant LBJ heard the crack of Oswald’s rifle on that November morning in Dallas, he “was both exhilarated and apprehensive”? Defying commonsensical convention, Woods (History/Univ. of Arkansas) presumes to inhabit the president’s mind at key moments, and he over-dramatizes where plenty of drama is already in play. Despite these blemishes, Woods’s life of the blustering Texan who found John Kennedy too conservative has many virtues. He ably depicts how childhood circumstances—poverty, an alcoholic father, a domineering mother—forged Johnson’s character, and often not to the good; by the time he entered college, LBJ had a knack for making enemies and a tendency to bully and manipulate others into doing his dirty work. He was secretive and aggressive, earning the nickname “Bull” for his rough ways and nonstop talking. For all his flaws, though, Johnson evolved into a definitive politician brilliantly skilled at forging strange-bedfellows alliances and making compromises. One of his first acts on entering the Senate was to forge a close relationship with Georgian Richard Russell, a segregationist and right-winger who was also a master of persuasion and vote-getting. Johnson quickly learned, and he outpaced the master, who exclaimed, “The son of a bitch, you can’t say no to him!” LBJ kept the South Democratic; he gathered power carefully, amassing blackmail-worthy dossiers on his colleagues, and used that power to win pitched battles—all fine, so long as he was striving for social justice and racial equality. Alas, Vietnam derailed him, and Woods’s book closes lingeringly on a president so broken by that distant war that he welcomed the prospect of either Bobby Kennedy’s or Richard Nixon’s taking over the White House to “heal the wounds now separating the country.”
A sympathetic, well-rounded complement to Robert Caro’s monumental biography-in-progress.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-684-83458-8
Page Count: 1024
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2006
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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