A text that will serve both as a solid reference work and as a milepost in the evolving and ever changing reputations of our...
A C-SPAN publication that employs surveys of historians to rank the American presidents, featuring lightly edited transcripts of interviews with historians who have published about each POTUS.
Because Donald Trump has not yet completed his term, he is not included in the rankings, but near the end, there is a transcript of a conversation among three historians about him—a fairly moderate, mostly nonjudgmental conversation. The pieces about each president are generally uniform in length (a dozen pages or so) and include basic biographical information with a justification for the reason that he has achieved his status. Unsurprisingly, Lincoln is at the top and James Buchanan at the bottom. Among the pleasures of the texts are the little-known—and sometimes quirky—details about the presidents: George Washington didn’t like to be touched; Teddy Roosevelt saw the last live passenger pigeon; James Monroe nearly fought a duel with Alexander Hamilton; John Quincy Adams loved the work of Lord Byron. Also intriguing are the factoids that do not appear—e.g., the chapter on Franklin Pierce doesn’t mention that Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote his campaign biography and that Pierce was with the author of The Scarlet Letter when he died. The issue of slavery comes up continually—no surprise since many of the early presidents owned slaves—and some writers try to soften this by mentioning how this was another time. Some of the contributors who deal with the low-ranking presidents (Harding, Pierce, Buchanan, and others) manage to find some things to admire: Harding appointed a great Cabinet; Buchanan was highly qualified. The contributor list is impressive: Douglas Brinkley, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Harold Holzer, David Maraniss, Robert Caro, Amity Shlaes, Evan Thomas, and Edna Greene Medford, among many others.
A text that will serve both as a solid reference work and as a milepost in the evolving and ever changing reputations of our presidents.Pub Date: April 23, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5417-7433-9
Page Count: 560
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2019
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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