A significant, brightly written American story.
An exhaustive biography of Edward M. House (1858-1938), the wealthy Texan who served as President Woodrow Wilson’s chief personal adviser and envoy to Europe in World War I.
Growing up in a prominent Houston family, House proved an indifferent student at Cornell, worked in the family business and then devoted his life to pursuing his fascination with the mechanics of politics. With keen insights into human behavior and a crafty knack at behind-the-scenes political infighting, he helped elect four governors of Texas, one of whom dubbed him with the honorific “Colonel House.” In 1911, he met Wilson, then governor of New Jersey, and together, they forged “one of the most famous friendships in American political history.” Neu (Emeritus, History/Brown Univ.; America's Lost War: Vietnam, 1945-1975, 2005, etc.), who set this massive project aside several times over the past four decades to publish other books, has used House’s diary and other papers to craft a remarkably vivid account of the political operator’s life; his critical unofficial role in U.S. diplomatic relations during the Great War; and his intimate relationship with Wilson as a supportive friend and adviser who correctly assessed the looming storm in Europe. For seven years, House was treated like a member of the White House family, carrying out interpersonal tasks Wilson found distasteful, meeting with European leaders and helping prepare the way for the war’s end. Neu’s engrossing narrative has such immediacy that readers share House’s hurt and disappointment when Wilson abruptly ended their close friendship. The break came after the president’s debilitating 1919 stroke, when Wilson’s second wife, Edith, who disliked House, seized his role. House was not invited to the president’s funeral. Neu deems House a “patient, crafty, and sometimes cynical” infighter and “a shrewd observer of human foibles,” widely admired but faulted by some at the height of his fame for developing an exaggerated sense of his own importance.
A significant, brightly written American story.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0195045505
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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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