All walks of life are represented in this immense cross section of Americans' grief and groping for comprehension.
A mostly reverential compendium of voices touched by the promise and spirit of John F. Kennedy’s presidency—and the shock of his death.
Keen observers of the president, members of his devoted staff, children of his advisers, civil rights leaders, eyewitness journalists and youth inspired by his brief, shining administration—all offer their concise statements and appraisals in veteran journalist Owen’s collection. The author was just 7 years old on the date of the assassination, riveted like the rest of the country to the TV (“the centrifuge of the country,” as Tom Brokaw calls it) and ultimately galvanized by the craft of journalism. Some of the accounts are extracts from copyrighted statements evidently published in previous books, such as Walter F. Mondale’s The Good Fight and Vincent Bugliosi’s Reclaiming History, all of which expound poignantly on this most intimate “death in the family.” Some of the statements are truly elucidating and mesmerizing, such as those by then–special assistant counsel Joseph A. Califano Jr., who proudly applauded JFK’s prescient civil rights speech of June 1963 (a crusade taken up by his brother, Robert); and by Rev. Billy Graham, who had spent time with the president and was impressed by his concern “about the moral and spiritual condition of the nation,” noting the day after Kennedy died that “the entire nation [was] thinking more about death and eternity than at any time since the war.” Other accounts are more curious and questionable, such as those by Army officer Andy Carlson, who led the riderless horse “Black Jack” during the funeral, and by Ruth Paine, who was living with Marina Oswald at the time. Given the ongoing, apparently insatiable curiosity about the Kennedy assassination, most readers will probably find it all equally fascinating.
All walks of life are represented in this immense cross section of Americans' grief and groping for comprehension.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-62636-034-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
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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