Solid biography of the longtime editor-publisher of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, by Pfaff (Journalism/Penn State). Joseph Pulitzer, Sr., was a larger-than-life figure, a Hungarian Jew plagued by diabetes, ill-health, and violent mood- swings who once shot a fellow-legislator for calling him a liar. (Joseph II later took a swing at William Randolph Hearst for calling his father a pimp.) Pulitzer, Sr., continued to run his publishing empire after going blind, all the while harassing his three sons unceasingly. His middle son and namesake (1885-1955) grew into a big, hearty, sports-loving, happy-go-lucky adolescent who was thrown out of prep school, flunked out of Harvard, made friends wherever he went, and became quintessentially American while infuriating Father by his enjoyment of life. As much a book about publishing greats, this is a father-son black comedy about a pair of high-stakes edge-players, both of them awesomely industrious. The father demanded an endless apprenticeship of his sons that involved reporting in detail on daily activities and being moved about the world like chessmen, but Joseph II never feared him, crossing him from time to time (e.g., by suggesting that lucrative patent-medicine ads be dropped from his father's New York World). Joseph II stuck it out, and after his father's death in 1911 created a great ``crusading, liberal, usually Democratic'' newspaper that sent reporters far afield. ``Many a politician and wealthy St. Louis businessman detested the Post-Dispatch,'' says Pfaff, and with reason—it pioneered investigative journalism on issues including the Teapot Dome scandal, the impeachment of corrupt judges, and even an illegal railroad-franchise scheme involving Joseph II's uncle. By the time of his death in 1955, Joseph Pulitzer II was virtually blind himself, working as hard as his father ever had. The vigor and creativity of the Pulitzers have never been in question, but who they were as people comes through richly here. (Sixty-nine photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Oct. 25, 1991
ISBN: 0-271-00748-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1991
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
PERSPECTIVES
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