It was ideas and ideals that drove the Roosevelt women, particularly those influenced by the genes of Georgia belle Mittie Bulloch, says the author in this curiously engrossing overview of the Roosevelt XX-factor. As she researched an earlier book, First Ladies (not reviewed), historian Caroli was intrigued by the question of who provided Eleanor Roosevelt with models. Her mentor at an English boarding school is often given the credit, but Eleanor spent only three years at Allenswood, a brief respite in a life racked by early tragedy (the death of brother, mother, and father) and later turmoil (within a five-year span, the birth of her sixth child, discovery of her husband’s well-established affair with Lucy Mercer, and Franklin’s attack of polio). Caroli believes it was the influence of her aunts, cousins, and even her maligned mother-in-law, Sara, that set Eleanor on the path to becoming “First Lady of the World.” A chapter each is devoted to the primary exemplars, beginning with the matriarch, Martha (Mittie) Bulloch, who married a Theodore Roosevelt and moved to New York City not long before the Civil War, knowing she would face prejudice and misunderstanding because her family owned slaves. She toughed it out, giving birth to four children, including the future president Theodore and Eleanor’s father, Elliott. Mittie’s daughters Anna, known for her warmth, wit, and political acumen, and Corinne, also politically astute and in later life a sought-after public speaker, each receive a chapter, as do Eleanor and cousins Corinne Alsop, Ethel Derby, and Alice Longworth, Teddy’s tart- tongued daughter. Sara (Franklin’s mother) and Edith (Teddy’s second wife), although Roosevelts only by marriage, share a chapter where the author tries to correct Sara’s image as dominating and manipulative, and Edith’s as the perfect wife and mother. Great fun for Roosevelt buffs; filling in some gaps for those still unable to reconcile how the awkward, uncertain Eleanor became an international icon. (photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1998
ISBN: 0-465-07133-3
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
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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