The superb first installment in a planned two-volume biography of the greatest Northern general of the Civil War—and one of the most remarkable military figures of all time. Simpson (History/Arizona State Univ.; The Reconstruction Presidents, 1998) is an oft-published authority on the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Here he takes on the case of U.S. Grant, whose unlikely rise from West Point—trained failed businessman to the pinnacle of military power is one of the most extraordinary success stories in American history. Appropriately enough, roughly 80 per cent of the volume concerns Grant’s military career, from his service in the Mexican War through his triumph at Appomattox. But the distinctive value of Simpson’s work, especially compared to William McFeely’s prizewinning biography, is that he does not slight Grant’s personal life, especially his fraught relationships with his father and slaveholding father-in-law and his marriage to Julia Dent Grant. Moreover, Simpson is unfailingly balanced and judicious in his assessments of military decisions, battles, and politics. While he is clearly partial to his subject, he does not shy away from Grant’s tactical errors or the never-stilled rumors of his excessive drinking (for which Simpson finds insufficient evidence and many embellished stories). Why, given the existence of so many other studies about the man and his times, would anyone want to read this lengthy biography? Because it is skillfully written; because Grant’s life is more fully realized in it than in previous one-volume studies; and because Simpson, who has benefited from decades of Civil War study, wears his wide-ranging scholarship lightly. Guaranteed to enlighten and please anyone who hasn’t had enough of the Civil War and its central figures. (7 maps, not seen)
Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2000
ISBN: 0-395-65994-9
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1999
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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