Despite the author’s drifts into hagiography and occasionally contrived prose (“his dentition was assisted by artifice”),...
London mayor Johnson (Johnson's Life of London: The People Who Made the City that Made the World, 2012, etc.) takes a look at the quintessential British leader and his massively widespread influence on global affairs.
The author studies how this one incredible man played some role in every war from the Boer War to the Cold War. Young Churchill was effectively ignored by his aristocratic father and received little attention from his American-born mother. Nonetheless, he developed an incredible ego and belief in his own prowess. Of course, he wasn’t actually perfect and made plenty of mistakes, many of which Johnson covers in a delightful chapter called “Winston Churchill and the Art of Surviving the Cataclysmic Cock-Up.” The author attempts to explore the personality of Churchill and how he reacted to situations. Though his drinking was legion, Johnson points out that, on the other hand, Hitler was a teetotaler, “a deformity that accounts for much misery.” Churchill possessed a gambler’s temperament, fearing no risk, and he was also a weathervane for political thought. From his father, who was unrepentantly disloyal, he inherited his disdain of party loyalty, and he made it his life’s work to make his name one of the most significant in political and diplomatic history. In his dealings with Hitler, Johnson refers to him as “the crowbar of destiny,” since “[i]f he hadn’t…put up resistance, that Nazi train would have carried right on.” As the author demonstrates, Churchill still affects us all, from the makeup of the Middle East (he coined the phrase) to the Cold War and the European Union—not to mention the prodigious amount of writing he left behind.
Despite the author’s drifts into hagiography and occasionally contrived prose (“his dentition was assisted by artifice”), reading about Churchill is always a delight, and Johnson is an accomplished, accessible writer.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2014
ISBN: 978-1594633027
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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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