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
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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