An enjoyable look at a man on the “edge of politics” who had a strong influence on Lincoln’s development.
An examination of one of Abraham Lincoln’s male friendships that has been profoundly “misunderstood.”
Strozier’s (Until the Fires Stopped Burning: 9/11 and New York City in the Words and Experiences of Survivors and Witnesses, 2011, etc.) first book on Lincoln, Lincoln’s Quest for Union (1982), was a psychoanalytic study of the president containing one chapter about his close friendship with Joshua Speed from 1837 to 1842. The misunderstandings and insinuations of a homosexual relationship have led him to write this account of their friendship. They met at Speed’s store. Since Lincoln was broke, Speed offered to share his room and bed with him at no charge. This was the gathering place where Lincoln polished his narrative talent. The two men lived together for almost four years, and Speed largely became the center of Lincoln’s emotional well-being, assuaging his fears while sharing his own inadequacies. Both men suffered from depression, and both had endured troubled relationships with their fathers. Speed was known as a lady’s man, while Lincoln was painfully shy. Speed was a born businessman, eventually becoming very rich—too rich to accept a cabinet post in his friend’s administration. Lincoln was poor, but he was certain of his future greatness. Lincoln’s fall into depression and thoughts of suicide after his broken engagement were only relieved with Speed’s help. William Herndon, Lincoln’s law partner, collected an oral history after Lincoln’s death. While Strozier uses it as one of his sources, he warns the work should be taken with a grain of salt. As a slave owner, Speed didn’t even vote for Lincoln, but he was largely responsible for keeping Kentucky in the Union. Lincoln trusted him so much that he even showed him the draft of the Emancipation Declaration. Speed’s marriage and move to Louisville left Lincoln desperate for his “crutch,” but it also freed him to renew his proposal to Mary and work to overcome his debilitating depressions on his own.
An enjoyable look at a man on the “edge of politics” who had a strong influence on Lincoln’s development.Pub Date: May 3, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-231-17132-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 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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