A thoroughly researched, nuanced appreciation of a complex, talented and troubled man.
A National Book Award–winning historian takes an in-depth look at the 20th-century’s most innovative publishing titan.
The son of a Presbyterian missionary, Henry R. Luce (1898–1967) grew up in China. Eager for distinction as a scholarship student at Hotchkiss and Yale, Luce, along with classmate Brit Hadden, founded Time in 1923. This invention of a weekly news magazine designed to inform people about an increasingly complex world started a publishing empire that eventually included the popular pioneer of photojournalism, Life, along with Fortune and Sports Illustrated. With ventures into book publishing, radio and newsreels, Luce consistently demonstrated an almost unerring instinct for connecting with the public. Amassing great wealth while notoriously imposing a distinct editorial slant on all his publications, he championed American exceptionalism, warned against the dangers of isolationism and ardently promoted the virtues of capitalism. In graceful prose, Brinkley (History/Columbia Univ.; Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 2009, etc.) tells especially interesting stories about Luce’s curious relationship with Hadden, his difficult dealings with star writers Whittaker Chambers and Theodore White, his uncharacteristically high-profile involvement in the Willkie campaign and his odd attraction to the Kennedy candidacy. A stout cold warrior, Luce spent the last decades of his life constantly traveling, attempting to exert hands-on control over his vast domain and negotiating a tumultuous second marriage with the difficult and glamorous Clare Boothe Luce. Brinkley portrays Luce as ferociously ambitious, endlessly curious, fundamentally restless, virtually friendless and, by his death, deeply unhappy. Notwithstanding the publisher’s heroic efforts to shape his times, Brinkley correctly identifies Luce’s real achievement: the publications he created, “reflections of the middle class world” of a nation that had reached unprecedented heights of power and influence.
A thoroughly researched, nuanced appreciation of a complex, talented and troubled man.Pub Date: April 22, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-679-41444-5
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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