This and Sorensen's Kennedy (p. 860) will continue to stand out long after the discussion of whether or not "instant history" is a valid, or even ethical, form. Schlesinger's book is much more intimate in tone than Sorensen's and its spiced word portraits of the men around Kennedy have drawn the heaviest fire based on the two pre-publication exposures in Life. Yet, it will be for these that future historians will thank him, while today's critics will read him avidly — and then decry him, from huff to howl. Schlesinger obviously did not labor in awe of his President; theirs were equal, atypical backgrounds and they shared many of the same intellectual and social contacts. The many quotations he attributes to Kennedy and his circle show a keen ear for the flash fire of political wit and a taste for invective that was likely to be suppressed in their public utterances. This helps close the distance that has inevitably increased between Kennedy the man and Kennedy the martyr. A Thousand Days is more than a 1000 pages long if you count the index and Schlesinger has isolated the personalities, the election, the Congressional record, the international crises and the domestic issues in long, speculative chapters. He was aware of and particularly good at estimating the Kennedy influence beyond the political. In the arts, American humor, and intellectual as well as general attitudes, the Kennedy style had something going and the author/historian is especially competent to trace it. If Sorensen is the better memorializer, Schlesinger is the better visualizer. Both have written that seldom book — the one you have to read and will probably want at home.
Pub Date: Nov. 29, 1965
ISBN: 0618219277
Page Count: 1124
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1965
BOOK REVIEW
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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