Well done. An engaging dual biography of a most intriguing power couple.
A touching, sympathetic portrait of a successful marriage despite the agony and the stress, emphasizing Lady Bird Johnson’s spectacular inner grit.
As an accomplished biographer of several works on presidential wives (The Roosevelt Women, 1998, etc.), Caroli does an impressive job refuting the “doormat” reputation of a humiliated wife to a coarse, philandering Texan by underscoring the symbiotic relationship that mutually sustained the couple through their whole lives. The only daughter born to a cultured, troubled gentlewoman who died early from mysterious circumstances and a larger-than-life, self-made businessman, Claudia Taylor, aka Lady Bird (1912-2007), learned a great deal from her pragmatic, number-crunching father—namely, to be self-sufficient and unafraid to take risks. Meeting former Texas schoolteacher Lyndon Johnson and then running Texas Congressman Richard Kleberg’s Washington office, in 1934, Lady Bird resisted being swept off her feet by the blustering, ambitious young man, who pressured her into marriage, sensing she had the “emotional ballast he needed to achieve his ambition.” Indeed, the leitmotiv here is that Lady Bird provided the necessary counterbalance to Johnson’s often overweening narcissism, which revealed itself in abusive, self-pitying outbursts that only she could smooth out. His outsized ambition in Congress and the Senate allowed her a place at the table, and she became a highly effective political tool for her husband’s career. Moreover, she used her business acumen to take part in a series of forward-seeing investments in radio and TV in the 1940s that made the couple rich. Caroli creates a vibrant portrait of a first lady who liked campaigning and learned how to speak publicly and effectively. Once her husband became vice president, she teamed up with Jackie Kennedy to shine as a political spouse when her husband was floundering. Unlike Bess Truman or Mamie Eisenhower, Lady Bird was not about to keep her mouth shut, turning her husband’s chronic philandering to her advantage.
Well done. An engaging dual biography of a most intriguing power couple.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4391-9122-4
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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