A welcome addition to the literature of the old Northwest.
Richly detailed life of Granville Stuart (1834–1918), whose adventures on the northern frontier rivaled those of better-known figures such as William Cody.
Stuart, write Milner and O’Connor (History/Arkansas State Univ.; co-editors: The Oxford History of the American West, 1994), was a good record-keeper in adulthood, amassing a vast archive of letters, diaries and other documents to aid him when it came time to write his memoir. Yet his early years are something of a blank. For instance, he claimed to have been born in Clarksburg, Va. (now West Virginia), whereas the event took place across a county line—an emendation that perhaps “represented some enhancement to his family’s status,” though we will never know. After a boyhood on the Iowa prairie, Stuart traveled west to the California goldfields, where he established patterns that would last through much of his life. Wealth constantly eluded him, though in time he became rich. He also became a careful observer of the scene and, though not without qualification, a defender of Native American people, recognizing early on that they were being displaced from their ancestral grounds and “decimated by the massive numbers of outsiders who swarmed into their homelands.” Indeed, after moving to Montana, Stuart married a Shoshone woman, even as the influx of whites into the region brought disapproval of once-common mixed marriages and mixed-race children. Stuart’s records of life in the mining camps and ranch country of Montana, noting ethnic relations, incidents of vigilantism and other frontier realities, are important sources for historians. Milner and O’Connor’s biography lends specificity to them and fills in some gaps, particularly ones that Stuart, late in life and now a diplomat serving in South America, chose to leave deliberately.
A welcome addition to the literature of the old Northwest.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-19-512709-6
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2008
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
