A revealing biography with unmistakably powerful contemporary parallels to recent presidential spouses, from Anthony (First Ladies, 2 vols., 1990, 1991). Plain and five years older than Warren, Florence was more indispensable helpmate than lover to her randy spouse. Anthony discloses what she assiduously sought to conceal, depicting a woman whose air of command (her husband nicknamed her —Duchess—) was a necessity for someone badly served by those closest to her. Escaping from a tyrannical father in small-town Ohio, she bore an illegitimate baby by a ne—er-do-well neighbor at age 19, only to have the father abandon her and their baby. Having obtained a common-law divorce, she later won the handsome Warren, supplying the drive and business acumen that propelled him from newspaper editor to president. Halfway through her marriage, she discovered Warren’s affair with her friend Carrie Phillips. Friends such as Harry Daugherty, Jess Smith, Charlie Forbes, and Albert Fall helped destroy her husband’s reputation through scandals such as Teapot Dome. A trusted family doctor, Anthony concludes, caused Warren to die by misdiagnosing heart trouble as food poisoning (and led Florence to cover up the mistake). Even boon companion Evalyn McLean, the morphine- and alcohol-abusing owner of the Washington Post, allowed Warren to use her mansion for trysts. In many ways, Florence deserved better. She relentlessly pushed causes (aid for veterans, animal rights, Zion National Park, women’s suffrage) and, even before Eleanor Roosevelt, made the First Lady a figure of visibility, influence, and popularity. Inevitably, a public gripped by gossip in recent years about popular presidents and their assertive wives will find echoes in this chronicle, such as affairs, a friend’s suicide, and a First Lady who consulted an astrologer. While sometimes overly reflective of Anthony’s painstaking research, this biography is a fascinating account of one of the most complex of all the political wives of this century. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: June 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-688-07794-3
Page Count: 623
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1998
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
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
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