A superb contribution to presidential history.
The impeachment of a president is a court of last resort—even one who willfully breaks laws while in office. Thus this lucid, timely study of the sole impeachment trial convened until 1998.
Andrew Johnson was an accidental president, brought into office with the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. He immediately began to alienate allies: He was not keen on the prospect of African-American equality, pretty much ignored Congress, and quietly undid some of the work of Reconstruction. Writes Wineapple (Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877, 2013, etc.), ultimately, “he sought to restore the South as the province of white men and to return to power a planter class that perpetuated racial distrust and violence.” Moreover, he considered Lincoln-variety and more radical Republicans to be his enemies, not the former traitors who had seceded from the Union. For all that, as the author lays out in her carefully constructed narrative, Johnson made powerful enemies indeed. These included Lincoln’s secretary of war, the indispensable politician Edwin Stanton, whom Ulysses S. Grant called “one of the great men of the Republic”; and the expansionist senator Charles Sumner, famed for having been caned on the floor of the Senate after denouncing slavery, who definitively turned on Johnson—whom he called “ignorant, pig-headed, and perverse”—when Johnson allowed the Southern states to bypass the question of whether blacks would be allowed to vote. The last straw was when Johnson refused to sign a civil rights bill with characteristic scorn. As Wineapple writes, “if the winning combination had been demagoguery and orneriness, with a touch of malice, that…no longer worked so well." Johnson was hauled before a court of impeachment but was acquitted after a series of legal arguments that the author renders with verve and skill, no easy feat given the technical nature of some of them—though, as she notes, the central question is one fit for the present moment: “What constituted an impeachable offense?”
A superb contribution to presidential history.Pub Date: May 21, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9836-8
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
