Plenty of long, definitive works exist, but Brinkley takes his job seriously, filling 160 pages with a thoughtful,...
The admirable American Presidents series nears its end with another slim but astute biography by another big-league historian, this time Brinkley (The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century, 2010, etc.).
The reputations of his predecessor (Eisenhower) and successor (Lyndon Johnson) are rising steadily; not so with John F. Kennedy (1917-1963), whose middle-of-the-pack rating has changed little. This seems a fair evaluation of his actual accomplishments, admits Brinkley, who adds that he left an enormous legacy as a charismatic leader and a glamorous symbol of hope and purpose long after his death. He was the handsome, unscholarly, self-indulgent son of Joseph Kennedy, whose enormous wealth and ambition cleared his path through Massachusetts and then national politics. As a congressman and senator, Kennedy may have been more conservative than Eisenhower—more fiercely anti-Soviet, in favor of military spending, uninterested in domestic reform and civil rights and an admirer of Joseph McCarthy. Elected our youngest president in 1960 by a tiny margin, his charm enchanted the nation despite a first year that included the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion and bungled Vienna summit. Experience and input from advisors, including his brother, Robert Kennedy, improved his performance and social conscience, but Congress rejected his bills advancing civil rights, tax reform, aid to education, medical care for the elderly and antipoverty efforts. All passed under Lyndon Johnson, who possessed political skills that Kennedy lacked.
Plenty of long, definitive works exist, but Brinkley takes his job seriously, filling 160 pages with a thoughtful, opinionated biography.Pub Date: May 8, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8050-8349-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: March 25, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2012
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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