Cool, lucid account of the later years of a towering cold-war figure; by Brinkley (History/Hofstra Univ.). Dean Acheson had two careers: one a nearly seamless ascent (Groton, Yale, Navy, Harvard Law) to secretary of state under Truman; the other, beginning with a testy 50's interregnum as gadfly to the Republican Party, is Brinkley's subject. Bedeviled by McCarthyist charges that he had ``lost China'' and was soft on Communism, Acheson emerged a different and puzzling man, a bellicose adviser to several Presidents he had previously scorned, and dangerously acerbic. Acheson, said Chester Bowles in 1963, ``likes not only to disagree with people, but to destroy them if he can.'' Brinkley reveals the furies unleashed in this determined anti-Communist by right-wing attacks, showing Acheson's evolution into a power-player whom men like Robert Kennedy and Dean Rusk saw as ``heedless and unrelenting...deformed in the crucible of McCarthyism.'' The author balances history and biography expertly, maintaining clear focus on Acheson's analysis of events and his complex personal interplay with the statesmen of his time. A superhawk on Vietnam, Acheson managed to work with the cautious JFK not only because Acheson was a loyal Democrat and consummate professional but also, as is clear throughout, because of his need to be close to power. Though perceived by Kennedy as ``an old man from another era,'' Acheson became a valued adviser from the Berlin Wall and Cuban missile crises through the events in Cyprus and Vietnam, but particularly in Europe, where he shored up relations with de Gaulle, Adenauer, and others. Acheson performed similar services for LBJ and, amazingly, for his old enemy Nixon, provoking Acheson's wife to regret that ``her husband had fallen prey to a campaign of flattery waged by Nixon and Kissinger.'' Even Acheson, for all his crustiness, would have respected the clear, concise writing and objectivity of this fine political biography. (Twenty illustrations—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-300-04773-8
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1992
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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