Crisp personal portraits of two leaders (and their wives) shaping the new world order.
Exploration of the deepening friendship between two contrasting Western leaders at a time of perilous Soviet brinkmanship.
A prolific British-American biographer who grew up in Washington, D.C., Sandford departs from his usual subjects from the world of arts and entertainment (Masters of Mystery: The Strange Friendship of Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini, 2011, etc.), providing a comparative portrait of two consummate politicians who helped mend the “special relationship” that had soured during the Suez Crisis. Harold Macmillan (1894-1986), a middle-class publisher’s son with a doting American mother, had acceded as British prime minister in the wake of Anthony Eden’s resignation in 1956 and had already been trying to mend fences with the frank President Dwight Eisenhower. With his election in 1960, President John Kennedy, more than two decades Macmillan’s junior, was just the brash, charming and intellectual personality to foil and complement his more formal counterpart’s “mandarin inscrutability.” Sandford delights in contrasting the two characters, ancient and modern, rendering engaging reading through the alarming crises that erupted during the course of Kennedy’s administration. Over numerous visits and increasingly warm communications between the “dear friends,” the two leaders had to work together to manage Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev’s blustery threats in Berlin and Cuba, where the United States’ highly secretive Bay of Pigs debacle of April 1961 had already chastened the American administration. While Kennedy did not confer with Macmillan before the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, he was “extraordinarily receptive to British counsel,” despite British criticism of Macmillan as “passive” and “supine.” Sandford has an effective sense of character development as the leaders moved from one embroilment to the next.
Crisp personal portraits of two leaders (and their wives) shaping the new world order.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61614-935-2
Page Count: 325
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
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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