While mainly for specialists, this provocative and obviously timely analysis is an important reminder of the role that...
The moderate tradition in American politics.
“Ideologues may come and go, but as long as the republic persists, the prevailing tradition trends moderate,” writes Brown (History/Elizabethtown Coll.; Beyond the Frontier: The Midwestern Voice in American Historical Writing, 2009, etc.). In this welcome academic study, Brown—who wrote a biography of Richard Hofstadter, the noted historian who famously traced the paranoid strain in U.S. politics—considers the pragmatic, centrist leaders who have shaped America. From the skeptical New Englander John Adams, who avoided the partisanship of post-Revolution politics, to “consensus-driven realist” Barack Obama, there has always been a moderate style of leadership that “has on occasion proven to be a saving grace of sorts in American politics.” In densely detailed prose, Brown traces the centrist coalitions of various periods, from anti-slavery advocates to patrician-led opponents of political corruption, and examines the actions of their leaders, including Teddy Roosevelt, an honest broker between capital and labor, and Bill Clinton, who claimed “the prevailing middle ground in a post–New Deal, post-Reagan political culture.” The author’s other noted centrists include Abraham Lincoln and Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. Brown notes that before the Civil War, people expected to compromise on issues. Centrism reached a significant low point with the 1964 presidential candidacy of Barry Goldwater, who deemed moderates timid and indecisive. From our present politically divisive perspective, many of the author’s observations are jolting—e.g., moderate Republicans controlled the GOP from 1936 to 1976, and three generations of the primarily centrist Bush family influenced U.S. politics from 1952 to 2009. Brown quotes former Secretary of State Colin Powell approvingly when he urged his party to “drift a little bit back [to the center]…because that’s where the American people are.”
While mainly for specialists, this provocative and obviously timely analysis is an important reminder of the role that reason and compromise have played in bridging the gap between political extremes.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4696-2923-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Univ. of North Carolina
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2016
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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