Not exactly revelatory but an accessible biography that adds to the large body of existing FDR scholarship.
A straightforward, “flesh-and-blood” study of the president that underscores the depth and ambiguity behind the charming facade.
Hamby (Emeritus, History/Ohio Univ.; For the Survival of Democracy, 2007, etc.) recounts his early memories of hearing a Franklin Roosevelt fireside chat and the shocking announcement of his death on April 12, 1945. He fashions this study around the notion of how the life of a great personage shaped an entire era—namely, the way America wanted to see itself. FDR came from old money with a sense of “special social standing,” and he was imbued on both sides of his family with the ideals of “Calvinist piety, thrift and capitalist enterprise”—none of which he actually embraced. An only child adored by his parents, he was an early leader and a bit of a trickster who knew how to get around the proper rules. When his father died and his mother, Sara, devoted herself to him, he was able to maintain his independence and marry the woman he wanted, Eleanor; by his early 20s, he had “honed his skills of manipulation and deception to a scalpel’s edge.” This ability served him well in his increasingly public profile. Deeply influenced by the progressive ideals of his cousin Teddy Roosevelt and Eleanor’s strong commitment to public duty, FDR was becoming a leader who understood the needs of the people. Hamby moves thematically through the crucial next decades, focusing on FDR’s engagement of one challenge after the next: grim social realities that remained after the exalted victory in World War I; the polio that struck him down—though he transformed his affliction into a crusading philanthropy; and the desperate economic times that prompted him to harness the country to bold new ideas. Hamby also explores what he considers FDR’s crowning achievement: his “defense of democracy” during a horrendous global conflagration.
Not exactly revelatory but an accessible biography that adds to the large body of existing FDR scholarship.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-465-02860-3
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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
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