At odds with much scholarship, including recent work like David Donald’s “We Are Lincoln Men” (2003)—readers will want to...
Don’t tell Ralph Reed or Jerry Falwell, but the Log Cabin Republicans are on to something big.
The secret, according to the late Kinsey Institute sex researcher Tripp, was that Abraham Lincoln was gay. Or mostly so, as Tripp qualifies with careful provisos: by the Kinsey seven-point scale, in which 0 equals entirely heterosexual and 7 equals entirely homosexual, Lincoln rates a 5, “predominantly homosexual, but incidentally heterosexual.” That incidental tendency, of course, netted Lincoln a wife and four children, but Tripp argues that the Railsplitter had little use for or interest in women or children all the same, preferring the company of men, such as bodyguard D.V. Derickson, who shared Lincoln’s bed and nightshirt in the White House when Mrs. Lincoln was out of town. The evidence? Well, there were those eyewitness accounts of Derickson wandering around in Lincoln’s clothes. More incidentally, Tripp notes, are curiosities, such as the fact that Lincoln almost never went to church, though, when Mary Todd Lincoln was away, he was very likely to attend sermons with Derickson on a Sunday morning. Similarly, Tripp continues, Lincoln showered affection on one Elmer Ellsworth, who was inconveniently “definitely and explicitly heterosexual,” and who died very early in the war, both eventualities bringing yet more sorrow to the already melancholic president. And then there was Lincoln’s long-time dalliance with fellow lawyer Joshua Speed. Not to mention Mary’s general bossiness, bound to drive a fellow away from the hearth and into the arms of boon companions. Tripp approaches the matter with apparent sympathy, but his evidence is surrounded by much speculation and much poorly developed argumentation—the latter likely because the author died before revising the manuscript. In the end, readers will wonder about the ultimate point: Unless it helps correct current injustices, does it matter where Lincoln hung his stovepipe at night?
At odds with much scholarship, including recent work like David Donald’s “We Are Lincoln Men” (2003)—readers will want to approach this with some reserve. But an intriguing thesis all the same.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-6639-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
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
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
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