In a 1932 essay, James Thurber imagined a librarian of Congress, overwhelmed by pointless biographies of Civil Warera figures, imposing fines for new books about Lincoln. Wilson (director, International Center for Jefferson Studies), however, makes a highly original contribution to Lincoln studies with this thoughtful portrait of the war president's remarkable development during the 1830s and '40s from a frontier bumpkin into a rarely gifted leader. It is startling to encounter Wilson's portrait of the young Abe Lincoln as a small-time brawler and petty frontier politician who had troubled relations with women (ultimately resulting in a marriage of convenience to Mary Todd), suffered severe bouts of depression, and made vicious anonymous attacks on political opponents in newspapers. It is a truism that Lincoln's origins were humble. They were also, as Wilson reminds us, violent. On the frontier, one established one's manliness, and even one's political credibility, by fighting, wrestling, and even dueling, and Lincoln was a superior fighter. Indeed, a turning point of his life was his 1831 wrestling match with Jack Armstrong of the Clary's Grove Boys, which established Lincoln as a leader of the New Salem settlement. (In closely analyzing the many varied accounts of the match, Wilson conducts a fascinating exercise in historiography and the distortion of historical memory by the growth of legend and the passage of time.) And though ``honest Abe'' was honest indeed by frontier standards, he could be slippery and dissembling in the battles of prairie politics. He proved to be a sharp, unsparing tactician in court and in the Illinois legislature. Nonetheless, Wilson shows, Lincoln constantly battled his shortcomings and, endowed with innate sensitivity to people and a real regard for honorable conduct, transcended his rough origins to achieve national prominence and, ultimately, greatness. An absorbing and first-rate contribution to Lincoln studies. (2 maps and 3 photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-679-40788-X
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1998
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
PERSPECTIVES
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