JFK completists may find this useful, but Caroline Kennedy’s recent collection of interviews with her mother should be...
A sometimes-revealing but never earth-shattering portrait of John and Jacqueline Kennedy’s life in the White House—only within whose walls and only at the very end would they “finally bridge the yawning emotional chasm between them.”
Much-practiced celebrity biographer Andersen (Mick: The Wild Life and Mad Genius of Jagger, 2012, etc.) digs beneath the surface—and certainly deeper than in many of his other books—to examine the essential loneliness of both Jack and Jackie, both the products of privilege, both essentially abandoned, and both tough and independent. (Both were voracious readers, too, and of better things than celebrity biographies.) Jack channeled his emotional neediness through womanizing (and, courtesy of Andersen’s careful approach, we learn his pet name for his penis), including an undeniably sordid episode with a drunk teenager on Jackie’s own bed. Jackie channeled hers, in part, by riding horses, which occasioned barbs among the pair, he saying it was a sport that “appeals to some awfully dull people,” she saying, “I think Liberace looks in the mirror less often than Jack does.” But after the loss at birth of their son, Patrick, the two drew together, with JFK concerned that Jackie would slip into depression. Then came Dallas, and with it, Jackie’s steady role in holding the nation together in a profound moment of grief—grief that, as befit her character, she nursed in private. Andersen is evenhanded, but even so, he slips into the overstated clichés of the genre, as when after Jackie’s death: “Americans…contemplated what their world would be like without this living, breathing reminder of a man and an era of political idealism that…seemed at one time to hold so much promise.”
JFK completists may find this useful, but Caroline Kennedy’s recent collection of interviews with her mother should be readers’ first pick.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4767-3232-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2013
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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