The story of Lincoln and the Harrison murder trial is intriguing but not necessarily significant enough to merit its own...
A study of a murder trial with potential implications for the political career of our 16th president.
Abraham Lincoln was involved in thousands of cases in his distinguished legal career, few more intriguing than the 1859 murder trial of “Peachy” Quinn Harrison. ABC News chief legal affairs anchor Abrams (Man Down: Proof Beyond a Reasonable Doubt That Women Are Better Cops, Drivers, Gamblers, Spies, World Leaders, Beer Tasters, Hedge Fund Managers, and Just About Everything Else, 2011) and prolific author Fisher (co-author, with Richard Garriott: Explore/Create, 2017, etc.) assert that Lincoln’s successful defense of Harrison served as a springboard to the 1860 Republican presidential nomination. In July 1859, Greek Crafton physically attacked Harrison in a drugstore; Harrison responded by stabbing Crafton with a knife, mortally wounding him. A grand jury indicted Harrison for murder, prompting his father to hire Lincoln and Stephen Logan, Lincoln’s former law partner, as defense attorneys. What unfolded was a dramatic trial, a complete transcript of which was kept by stenographer and future congressman Robert R. Hitt. Harrison’s acquittal was largely due to the judge’s decision to allow Peter Cartwright—Harrison’s grandfather and loser of an 1846 congressional election to Lincoln—to testify that Crafton had given a deathbed absolution of Harrison. Lincoln’s dramatic closing argument before the jury may have also played a role. Abrams and Fisher adeptly place the Harrison trial within the context of Lincoln’s legal career and his well-known skills before a jury, but they fail to support their argument that the case “propelled” Lincoln to the presidency. The case had nothing to do with slavery, the dominant issue of the 1860 presidential campaign and election. Moreover, there are several examples of inaccurate dates—e.g., the Comstock silver lode was made public in 1859 but possibly discovered a year or two earlier—and the authors admit that at times, “we had to deduce what was said [by Lincoln and others and]…suggest appropriate thoughts and/or mannerisms.”
The story of Lincoln and the Harrison murder trial is intriguing but not necessarily significant enough to merit its own book.Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-335-42469-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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