A treasure trove that enriches understanding of some of the men and women who helped shape events from World War II to the...
An insightful, unique view of the multiple Pulitzer-winning liberal icon Arthur Schlesinger Jr. (1917–2007).
Serving as their father’s editor, Schlesinger’s sons—former ABC News documentary writer Andrew (Veritas: Harvard College and the American Experience, 2005, etc.) and former Time contributor and World Policy Journal publisher Stephen (Act of Creation: The Founding of the United Nations, 2003, etc.)—mined more than 60 years of his correspondence and worked through the thousands of letters held at the New York Public Library and other collections. They also drew from his wide-ranging and varied correspondents to produce a worthy follow-up and companion to their Journals: 1952–2000 (2007). The letters selected here provide a clear picture of the multifaceted talents of their father. Schlesinger’s credentials provided standing for the advice he addressed to Democratic presidential candidates Walter Mondale in 1984 and Bill Clinton in 1992. He helped them run effective campaigns and noted that they should avoid the temptation to “out-Republican the Republicans.” The letters also include exchanges with close friends, like socialite and political supporter Marietta Tree and economist John Kenneth Galbraith, as well as complete strangers. Schlesinger and National Review founder William F. Buckley Jr. corresponded over many years, each welcoming the other’s latest publication efforts and disputing the historical significance of such figures as Joseph McCarthy. The editors also do a good job of representing Schlesinger's relations with the Kennedy family over the years, and there are sharply penned rebuttals of critics of the Kennedy brothers' Cuba policy—e.g., Christopher Hitchens and Joseph Califano—in which Schlesinger’s attention to detail predominates. Pen portraits of Eleanor Roosevelt, Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon and Alger Hiss add to the mix, and the book also includes the author’s fears about the consequences of Ronald Reagan's term and the war in Iraq under the George W. Bush administration.
A treasure trove that enriches understanding of some of the men and women who helped shape events from World War II to the present.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9309-7
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2013
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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