The woman who emerges from this biography is a kind of classy Pamela Harriman—certainly not the image Marietta Peabody Tree, a minister's daughter and a Peabody of Massachusetts, envisioned for herself. That the two would be compared is inescapable—both blossomed in the interval between the world wars, both chose first husbands who would lift them from an imprisoning lifestyle, both subsequently married money that set them on paths to personal fulfillment as US ambassadors (Harriman to France, Tree to the UN), and both had celebrated and affluent lovers. Seebohm (The Man Who Was Vogue, 1982, etc.) staves off these comparisons, offering instead a chronological narrative that depends heavily on Tree's glamorous appointment books. That includes the era when Tree's first husband, Desmond FitzGerald, was at war (WW II) and she was a researcher for Time magazine; she represented liberal labor on the Newspaper Guild and high society on the limousine- liberal party circuit, and had an affair with actor/director John Huston. She divorced FitzGerald, married Ronald Tree, whose money was in America and whose heart was in England. Their marriage lasted until he died, during which time she established herself in the inner circles of the Democratic Party (politics being always her first love) and began a relationship with Adlai Stevenson that lasted until he died, literally, at her feet. She was an absent—and perhaps envious—mother of two famous daughters, Pulitzer Prize winner Frances FitzGerald and supermodel Penelope Tree. She died in 1991 of cancer, whose progress she hid from all but Frances, as she continued to party and attend meetings until shortly before her death. Too much emphasis on celebrity guest lists and the houses, dresses, and servants that money could buy override the very real courage that Tree and her generation demonstrated in demanding to lead their own lives. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-684-81008-5
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1997
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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