For students of the Revolutionary era, the author delivers a useful biography of a significant player in the birth pangs of...
A descendant of little-known Founding Father Thomas McKean (1734-1817) places him “in the context of his times.”
The director of policy planning at the Department of State and former staff director for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, David McKean (Tommy the Cork: Washington's Ultimate Insider from Roosevelt to Reagan, 2003, etc.) knows his politics and explains the difficulties encountered in uniting the widely varied states during the Colonial period. By the time Thomas McKean was 20, he had established himself as one of the hardest-working and most effective lawyers in New Castle, the capital of the lower counties of Pennsylvania. From there, the larger stage of Philadelphia called, offering culture, economics, and plenty of opportunities for an ambitious lawyer. McKean sat on every important commission of those early years, and the author praises his “pragmatism and political dexterity.” Establishing Pennsylvania’s new constitution led him to the radical small farmers and tradesmen in the West, who wanted to eliminate the property requirement, but McKean had no use for anyone who wasn’t of the professional trades—i.e., lawyers and doctors. He felt that only upper-class citizens could effectively run the country. The list of his accomplishments is long: he was a signer of the Declaration of Independence, a three-term governor of Pennsylvania, and the president of the Continental Congress. Most important was his devotion to the rule of law. His Supreme Court in Pennsylvania was more powerful than the newly established U.S. Court. He fought to establish equity between the three arms of government and served in all three. He was a powerful man living in the right time and place. At the same time, he was arrogant, vain, and overbearing, and he is credited with the beginnings of the “spoil” system of patronage and nepotism in America. His story has been long in coming and worth the wait.
For students of the Revolutionary era, the author delivers a useful biography of a significant player in the birth pangs of the new nation.Pub Date: May 10, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-61039-221-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
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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