Offers no surprising conclusions, but Thompson provides a well-researched, delightfully obsessive story, suitable for...
For a year, former Washington Post feature writer Thompson chased the King of the Wild Frontier.
In this evenhanded account, the author reports that it was his young daughter’s excited response to a Burl Ives’ recording of the Disney theme song that ignited his family’s interest in the historical David Crockett. And off he went—to sites in Tennessee, Alabama, Texas and Washington, D.C.—pursuing the frontiersman whose story, told in the three-part Disneyland series in the 1950s, caused the coonskin-cap phenomenon that spread rapidly across the country. The author sees no need for esoteric theories about its death: “It was a fad,” he writes. As Thompson tracked Crockett, he encountered local experts just about everywhere—people who were extraordinarily generous about driving him to remote locations and sharing their hard-won knowledge. He also interviewed some scholars, visited archives, browsed (and bought) in assorted gift shops, examined relics (the real, the risible) and attended festivities at the Alamo on the 175th anniversary of the battle. He found it wrenchingly difficult at times to chip away the thick carapace of fiction from Crockett’s life. Far less is known than many people would believe. Many stories, especially about the Alamo, elicit fiery emotions, especially in Texas. Thompson also read myriads of Crockett and Alamo books, examined the career of Fess Parker (Disney’s Crockett), and watched and analyzed the major (and some minor) movies, including those starring John Wayne and Billy Bob Thornton as Crockett. Neither Wayne nor Thornton, writes Thompson, showed us even a vaguely authentic Crockett.
Offers no surprising conclusions, but Thompson provides a well-researched, delightfully obsessive story, suitable for Crockett aficionados and neophytes.Pub Date: March 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-0307720894
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2013
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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