For good and ill—and, at times, to her husband’s chagrin—Nellie Taft was far from the standard-issue first lady. Anthony...
“Unconventional” is right: a pleasing biography of a beer-drinking, card-playing, cigarette-smoking presidential wife who insisted on a place at the political table, paving the way for successors such as Eleanor Roosevelt and Hillary Clinton.
Nellie Taft, writes presidential historian/biographer Anthony (The Kennedy White House, 2001, etc.), the wife of Republican stalwart William Howard Taft, initially exercised political power as first among equals in her Cincinnati crowd. She would always be a Cincinnati chauvinist, reminding audiences that Chicago was poorer and Cleveland not worth mentioning; yet she hungered to get out and see the world, and when it appeared that her husband was happy where he was, she pushed him to run for successively more important public offices, finally the presidency. (She also, Anthony suggests, had more than a little to do with keeping the rivalry between Taft and his predecessor and onetime friend Teddy Roosevelt alive: see Patricia O’Toole’s recent When Trumpets Call , p. 39.) Less reform-minded than Roosevelt and perceived by big business as a “sugarplum president,” Taft muddled along, his wife steadily urging him on, but she seems to have opposed the one job he really wanted: Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. She was also quite explicit in using the bully pulpit to advance women’s rights and other progressive issues; indeed, Anthony characterizes both Tafts as proponents of a “version of conservative progressivism” that had sharper teeth than today’s so-called compassionate conservatism. Nellie was personally liberal, which gave the scolds and moralists of her day plenty to cluck about; she also, though, held the usual class prejudices of her time, including old-school anti-Semitism (in Vienna in 1930, she complained that “generally the Jews here are awful, so objectionable”) and strong support for the Emperor of Japan, even as she suspected that Japan would soon go to war with the United States.
For good and ill—and, at times, to her husband’s chagrin—Nellie Taft was far from the standard-issue first lady. Anthony paints a vivid portrait.Pub Date: April 12, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-051382-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2005
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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