A brief study of the medical and political coverups that prevented the American people from learning that in 1944 they had reelected a president who was dying, from the prolific writer/editor who has created something of a sub-genre of history- -sick presidents (Ill Advised: Presidential Health and Public Trust, 1992, etc.). Ferrell leaves little doubt that by early 1944 Roosevelt was indeed dying. Examined by a leading heart specialist of the time, Dr. Howard G. Bruenn, on March 28, 1944, the president was diagnosed as having severe heart disease. Ferrell questions why such a serious condition wasn't detected earlier and places the blame clearly on the president's primary physician, Vice Adm. Ross McIntire, surgeon general of the US Navy. McIntire, a political appointee, was quite simply an incompetent doctor who over the years examined the president in only the most cursory ways. Still, the president was not the best of patients. He seemed to believe he could will away his maladies and didn't want to know the true condition of his health. FDR or his press secretary, Steve Early, even had J. Edgar Hoover send agents to Bethesda Naval Hospital to quash gossip among the doctors there as to the state of the president's health. Roosevelt, in his last year, worked four hours a day at most, at a time when WW II was approaching its final stages. Ferrell contends that if Roosevelt had been working at full capacity, the course of the war in the Pacific might have been quite different, China might not have become Communist, the Korean War might not have happened, and Nixon might not have resigned. This pushes historical speculation too far and contrasts poorly with the carefully researched narrative of FDR's last days, which is the bulk of the book. Though slight, this volume, based on much previously unavailable documentation, does provide an intimate glimpse of the last days of one of America's greatest presidents. (45 illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: March 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-8262-1171-2
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Univ. of Missouri
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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