A well-meaning but frustrated attempt to pierce the veil of history.
Media commentator Shirley (Citizen Newt: The Making of a Reagan Conservative, 2017, etc.) confronts the problem faced by all of Mary Ball Washington’s biographers: lack of material.
“Much of her life was a mystery,” writes the author, leaving him to speculate about her personality, appearance, beliefs, and especially her relationship with her eldest son, George. “Was she part helicopter mother, part ‘Mommie Dearest,’ ” he asks, using popular, if anachronistic, allusions, “or was she a saint and a joy for George? Historians down through the years have portrayed her as both.” Shirley looks to several earlier historians for their conclusions, making his biography “just as much a historiography of Mary Washington as it is a history.” Those historians, though, also worked with scant evidence, and their portraits were shaped by their own assumptions about how Colonial women must have, or should have, behaved as wives, mothers, and citizens. Hagiographical portraits depicted Mary as “the grandmother and redeemer of America” while one of Washington’s early biographers portrayed Mary as an ardent Loyalist, fiercely opposed to the Revolution. Shirley finds a sympathetic reading in Nancy Byrd Turner’s The Mother of Washington (1930), to which he frequently refers. He dismisses Marion Harland’s Story of Mary Washington, published in 1893, as being so hagiographical that it “glossed over” the death of Mary’s infant daughter “as if it was a distraction to the grand character of Mary and her relationship to her children.” Shirley thinks that Mary “must have been beside herself” because of the “inseparable and deeply unique connection between mother and daughter.” However, neither historian knows for sure. Throughout, Shirley guesses what Mary probably, might have, or perhaps felt. Although he draws on archival material from the papers of George Washington, the resources of the Mary Ball Washington House, and many biographies of Washington, at best, he offers more about Mary’s times—likely familiar to readers of Colonial history—than details of her life.
A well-meaning but frustrated attempt to pierce the veil of history.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-245651-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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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