One idea recurs: “[W]e can be better than we have been,” as Steven Spielberg puts it; we can “be uplifted and galvanized by...
Commemorating the 150th anniversary of Lincoln’s death, LIFE editors have produced an astonishing volume of images and essays.
Drawing on historical archives, libraries and the collection of Keya Morgan, a foremost collector of Lincoln photographs, the editors have selected 250 images, many never before published. Distinguished Civil War historian Guelzo (Gettysburg: The Last Invasion, 2013, etc.) contributes an authoritative seven-part biographical essay chronicling Lincoln’s birth in a “miserable habitation” in Kentucky; his years as a postmaster, shopkeeper and surveyor in Illinois; his four terms in the Whig minority of the Illinois state legislature; his apprenticeship as a lawyer; marriage to Mary Ann Todd; the loss of three of their four sons, and his wife’s “growing unhingement.” Yet he rallied forcefully in speeches and debates. As his rival Stephen A. Douglas remarked, “I’ve met him at the bar, I’ve met him on the stump, and I want to say to you, my friend, that he’s a hard man to get up against.” Central to this volume are 130 portraits from Morgan’s vast collection, including the earliest known image, a daguerreotype made in 1846 by a pioneering photographer; a Mathew Brady carte de visite used in Lincoln’s presidential campaign; and many more Brady images, some made just after Lincoln’s inauguration, others in 1864. Also included is a moving introduction by cultural historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. and a variety of contributions of 272 words (the number in the Gettysburg Address) reflecting on Lincoln’s legacy—among the respondents are Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush, Lech Walesa, Ken Burns, Billy Collins, high school students and soldiers serving on the U.S.S. Lincoln.
One idea recurs: “[W]e can be better than we have been,” as Steven Spielberg puts it; we can “be uplifted and galvanized by this suffering man who was a steadfast optimist in the name of freedom and equality.” That sentiment infuses and inspires this stunning portrait.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61893-072-9
Page Count: 192
Publisher: LIFE Books
Review Posted Online: July 7, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2014
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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