Will appeal most to academics and well-read general readers; more casual history buffs may find some of the prose a bit...
A leading New Deal scholar summarizes and provides critical analysis of President Roosevelt’s groundbreaking initial domestic and foreign initiatives.
Badger (American History/Cambridge Univ.; The New Deal: The Depression Years 1933-1940, 1989, etc.) reveals little new information here. The book’s distinguishing feature is the interpretive light the author shines on FDR’s political skills. The president’s ability to persuade lawmakers and his willingness to base policies on pragmatism rather than ideology sowed the seeds for the success of the programs subsequently implemented. Roosevelt, whom conservatives often demonize for having created the modern welfare and regulatory state, was in many respects a reluctant proponent of activist government. Badger notes that FDR’s policies at various times were criticized equally harshly by those on the left and the right. He also maintains that while many of the policies initiated during this period provided at least short-term relief to many people, their more significant impact was on the nation’s overall spirit and sense of self: “What he had not found in 1933 was the magic key to economic recovery. But in the Hundred Days Roosevelt demonstrated that a democracy need not be paralyzed in the face of economic catastrophe.” The author is less certain about another legacy of that period. By starting his presidency with such a flurry of activity, Roosevelt established a standard that journalists and historians have since used as a benchmark for measuring other presidents, most of whom have fallen short. Badger synthesizes a great deal of information in a small space, producing a readable, though not terribly lively narrative.
Will appeal most to academics and well-read general readers; more casual history buffs may find some of the prose a bit dense.Pub Date: June 3, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8090-4441-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2008
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
PERSPECTIVES
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