A magisterial work chronicling the life of a great American hero, from a National Book Award—winning author. If you’re writing a biography, choosing a subject involved in both one of the century’s great adventures and one of its great tragedies is a good start. If you go beyond a barrier-breaking flight to Paris and a baby’s kidnapping and can still draw upon controversial opposition to entering WWII and major contributions to the development of commercial aviation, so much the better. That this figure was also constantly in the media spotlight, regularly met with leading luminaries throughout the world, and had a wife whose life and accomplishments are fascinating in their own right, you have the substantive ingredients for a great biography. Fortunately for all of us, Berg (Goldwyn: A Biography, 1989; Max Perkins: Editor of Genius, 1978.) does a superb job with this material. His account of Lindbergh’s life is detailed without plodding, and extensive without seeming long; the pace is excellent throughout, with the reader continually drawn forward by the prose, even though one already knows what is going to happen. Berg’s perspective on Lindbergh is admiring but not fawning or unbalanced. Despite the appropriate respect accorded a man who genuinely did great things, Berg does not shy away from Lindbergh’s apparent anti-Semitism, his rigidity as a parent, regular absences as a husband, and lifelong restlessness. There’s an evenhanded look at Lindbergh’s trips to Germany and politics prior to WWII, and the insights into Lindbergh’s relations with the press are particularly interesting. As the first real media star, Lindbergh had an extreme reaction to the constant hounding by reporters and photographers—unprecedented in his day—that becomes understandable. Imagine coverage of Michael Jordan after the NBA finals, the O.J. Simpson trial, and the British royal family all rolled into one. Who, faced with this barrage, wouldn’t become uncommunicative and flee the country? With Berg’s free access to previously unavailable documentation, this is sure to be the definitive biography of Lindbergh. (First serial to Vanity Fair; film rights to DreamWorks)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-399-14449-8
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1998
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 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
PERSPECTIVES
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