The editor of Hostage to Fortune: The Letters of Joseph P. Kennedy (2001) returns with a thick, assiduously researched biography of Eleanor Medill “Cissy” Patterson (1881–1948), the powerful, tendentious editor of the Washington Times-Herald.
In this numbingly detailed biography, Smith gives us not just the story of her principal but her every element of her back story, and few minor characters walk her stage without major-character treatment. Patterson’s story is indeed complicated, engaging and even bizarre, though it takes her more than 40 pages to arrive in the narrative. A daughter of privilege and publishing, Patterson grew up without much of an education (finishing school sufficed); married an impecunious Polish count, Josef Gizycki, who had drinking, gambling, fidelity and domestic-abuse issues; bore a daughter, Felicia, with whom she would have a long, contentious relationship; fled from the count (who hid the daughter for 18 months) and retreated back into the world of her American family, whose wealth and influence defeated the count’s efforts to extract a portion of fortune for himself. Patterson would marry again, but she would also take over a struggling newspaper in Washington and convert it into an enormously profitable enterprise. She blasted away at FDR and became increasingly vindictive, mercurial and eccentric, before dying suddenly. A long, bitter battle over her complicated assets ensued. Smith seems fascinated by all the money (she frequently footnotes the estimated current value of sums made or spent by Patterson), and she seems unable to determine which biographical or contextual details are primary, secondary, tertiary or superfluous. So she includes them all, just in case. An enormously important subject obscured in a blinding blizzard of undifferentiated fact.
Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-375-41100-7
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2011
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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