A short, but complete look at the long adieu that moved the newly united states spiritually and politically.
Skillful and prolific pop historian Weintraub (Charlotte and Lionel, 2003, etc.) accompanies The Father of His Country for a few months at the end of 1783.
The revolutionary war Washington had successfully prosecuted against all odds was over. The Treaty of Peace had been negotiated, and fair copies were under sail from England. Redcoats were leaving America. Hessians were deserting before they could be shipped home. The Great Man’s public service appeared to be at an end, and Washington happily prepared to return his commander’s commission to Congress. He simply wanted to get home to Martha at Mount Vernon in time for Christmas. In most histories, where General Washington slept on the trip is, understandably, not treated in great detail. Weintraub (Arts and Humanities Emeritus/Penn State) supplies that detail in abundance. From New York, where the formidable general movingly bade farewell to his officers at Fraunces Tavern (the best known episode of the journey home) to the village of Princeton, then a week in Philadelphia and on to Baltimore and Annapolis before he reached the Potomac and home, the hero was lauded and feted all the way. Balls, dinners, fireworks,and speeches of tribute all testified to the universal veneration for America’s chief citizen. In reply to the encomia, his faithful speechwriter scribbled away, though his Excellency (as Washington was habitually addressed) seemed more than equal to the task. The general sought only to lay his sword aside to become “a private Citizen on the Banks of the Potomack,” and he was hailed as a latter-day Cincinnatus who, after securing his nation’s independence, wanted simply to return to his farm. That he disdained all mention of a crown may be Washington’s greatest gift to what he hoped would become a respectable member of the family of nations. How he became a majestic Chief Executive is another story.
A short, but complete look at the long adieu that moved the newly united states spiritually and politically.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-4654-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2003
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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