A fruitful if arguable thesis yields a book worth reading in this election year.
A stimulating look at the presidency from the vantage point of the wars America has fought—and, in some instances, the none-too-noble reasons for them.
New York University politics professors de Mesquita and Smith, co-authors of The Dictator’s Handbook: Why Bad Behavior Is Almost Always Good Politics (2011), seem guaranteed to ruffle nationalist feathers with a few of their reinterpretations of American history. Abraham Lincoln, for instance, promoted the federalist policies that led to the Civil War not just out of a wish to preserve the Union, but also out of “burning personal ambition,” his chief aim being to occupy the White House. While George Washington “is perhaps unique among American presidents in not having manifested any great desire for political power,” he also benefited greatly from the revolution in which so many shed their blood. By the authors’ account, the bloodier the hands of the president, oftentimes, the greater the esteem in which he (and perhaps she) will be held. Lincoln, for instance, won the presidency by the tiniest of electoral margins, with a split opposing ticket, so much so that only some 40 percent went to Lincoln; that was enough to carry the race, but we account him great for having led the nation through war. The authors propose an idealistic but not soppy counterfactual: if presidents were prized for keeping the peace, as well as not squandering the public treasure on war, then Warren Harding would top our list of greatest presidents, followed by Gerald Ford and then John F. Kennedy; Lincoln would rank near the bottom of the list, tying with George W. Bush. Even without exhaustive explanation of the methodology, these rankings are provocative, and certainly the authors do not shy from controversy—criticizing Barack Obama, for instance, for “a willingness to back down” in situations that could have done with more bellicosity.
A fruitful if arguable thesis yields a book worth reading in this election year.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-61039-662-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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
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