Somewhat arbitrarily organized but constantly revealing and intimate, a must for any political junkie’s personal bookshelf.
A sweeping panorama of family life on Pennsylvania Avenue.
In order to amass this weighty followup to First Mothers (2000), veteran journalist Angelo, who covered eight administrations for Time magazine, mined a prodigious variety of sources, including insights from serious journalists and pundits across two centuries; recollections of presidents’ family members; and tales tattled by White House employees. Most readers, once grabbed, will not care that some apocrypha and rank gossip surely holds together at least a few of these slices of life. The imagery is irresistible: The (Lyndon) Johnson girls barely moved in before trying to light a fire in the bedroom without opening the damper; Nixon, on the other hand, got cozy next to his mandatory roaring fireplace even when air conditioning was running full blast in the rest of the house. We learn that Harry Truman’s wife gave a thumbs-up to a butler who, after two failed attempts at mixing an Old Fashioned for Harry, finally just poured a slug of bourbon over ice cubes, and that spare trunks, in sizes ranging from King Farouk’s to Mahatma Ghandi’s, hung in the locker room off the indoor swimming pool installed for FDR (the pool was financed by dimes contributed by American kids). Personal correspondence from some of the 39 first ladies (Martha Washington did not live there) indicates that the intimidation of living in a fishbowl was a common initial reaction; yet many—like the career-Army Eisenhowers, who had never before lived as long as eight years in a single house—were crestfallen when it was time to leave.
Somewhat arbitrarily organized but constantly revealing and intimate, a must for any political junkie’s personal bookshelf.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-056356-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
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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