From Cook (History/John Jay; The Declassified Eisenhower, 1981, etc.)—the first volume of a massive biography of Eleanor Roosevelt, which, in seeking redress for its subject, is flawed by its own (feminist) biases. Long overshadowed by the achievements of FDR, Eleanor Roosevelt's own extraordinary life deserves wider attention. The poor little rich girl who was born into one of New York's wealthiest and most distinguished families was unkindly called ``Granny'' by her beautiful but cold mother; lost both her parents before she was 12; was taken in by relatives who made her always feel an outsider; and, once married, had to contend with a tyrannical mother-in-law and a philandering husband. And yet, Cook tells us, there were triumphs and periods of fulfillment— schooldays in London; ventures into politics and civic activities; and the golden interlude of the 1920's, when ER led her own life independent of FDR, becoming a sought-after speaker, activist, and commentator. Cook conscientiously records the achievements and the many unhappinesses—not just the discovery of FDR's affair with Lucy Rutherford—as well as the consolation of friends, mostly women (though Cook believes that ER had an affair with Earl Miller, one of the Roosevelts' security guards). The volume ends with FDR's election to the presidency, an achievement about which, for FDR's sake, ER was ``sincerely glad''—but which also led her to comment, ``Now I shall start to work out my own salvation.'' In less-than-luminous prose, ER gets her uncritical due while FDR becomes the typical male villain—duplicitous, weak, and owing everything to a good woman. Informative but not definitive. (Sixteen pages of b&w photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: April 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-670-80486-X
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1992
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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