For a picture of strict belief in class distinctions and the stupidity of the fools who accede to the good of the whole,...
As the great-nephew of the first president, Washington writes about a forgotten book he claims molded the Founding Father’s personality: H. de Luzancy’s A Panegyrick to the Memory of His Grace Frederick, Late Duke of Schonberg (1690).
The author deems it absolutely necessary that all Americans change their ways and become more like his great-uncle, ignoring the passage of more than 200 years of social, political and economic changes that have altered the need and/or usefulness of such a person. He does acknowledge modernity with comparisons that suit no purpose and make no point. This book seems to be Washington’s bully pulpit (his conclusion: “If you trust in Providence, follow your conscience, and keep an eye on the past to guide you,” he writes, “while you keep another eye on your goals, then you, too, can be good and great, just like George Washington”), and the narrative is loaded with witless asides and lazy writing (“What. A. Cool. Job.”; “I mean, it’s not for everyone, maybe, but, hey…”; “Hold on to your tri-cornered hats”) without which readers could possibly take him seriously. At the end of the book, the author briefly mentions that next to the Bible on Washington’s bedside was Addison’s Cato, which was staged at Valley Forge and from which he quoted as early as 1758. Cato, the virtuous republican who opposed Caesar’s tyranny, undoubtedly had a great deal more influence on the general than did Duke Frederick. This book is much more a venue for the author’s ultraconservative views—e.g., “stupid, bacon-loving Canadians”; “haughty contempt…a French specialty”; and especially, “the ignorant, stupid people who believe [in] the rule of Demos, the Mob.”
For a picture of strict belief in class distinctions and the stupidity of the fools who accede to the good of the whole, please step this way. For anyone else, take a pass.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62157-205-3
Page Count: 364
Publisher: Regnery History
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 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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