Readable, authoritative and, most usefully, inspiring.
Accomplished biographer Berg (Lindbergh, 1998, etc.) emphasizes the extraordinary talents of this unlikely president in an impressive, nearly hagiographic account.
Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924), writes the author, was a much more complex figure than he appeared to be; he was a man of astounding depths, conflicting desires and erudition, driven to make history by his passionate ideals. Titling his chapters rather grandiloquently with biblical catchwords usually associated with Christ’s journey (from “Advent” to “Pieta”), Berg brings out an enormously sympathetic side to the Princeton-educated lecturer who was first and foremost a brilliant writer. Wilson took his first postgraduate job teaching women at Bryn Mawr; he was an uxorious husband (twice) and devoted father to three daughters. Indeed, he was wildly in love with his soon-to-be second wife, Edith, just as the first great crisis of his presidency erupted over whether or not to go to war with Germany after the sinking of the Lusitania on May 7, 1915. A man of principles who ruled with rhetoric, Wilson took the controversial step of attending in person the Versailles Peace Conference, absenting himself from the United States (and the domestic political fray) for a now-unimaginable six months. A stable Europe could only be built on “a peace of justice,” he insisted; the pride of his life was the establishment of the League of Nations and implementation of his Fourteen Points, while his heartbreak remained the refusal of Congress to enact either. Berg passes more lightly over the Virginia-born Wilson's less-than-admirable position on African-American civil rights. The author devotes a good portion of the book to the years following Wilson’s 1919 stroke, the severity of which the public did not fathom; it was a well-kept secret that Edith largely ran the White House in the final 18 months of his presidency. Berg portrays Wilson as an utterly new kind of chief executive, in a mold that has yet to be refilled.
Readable, authoritative and, most usefully, inspiring.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-399-15921-3
Page Count: 800
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2013
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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