A revealing exploration of an exceptional marriage marked by mutual understanding, empathy and deep love.
A dual biography spotlighting one of the most remarkable partnerships in American history.
The United States has had only a few First Couples in which the historical significance of the wife has approached that of the husband. John and Abigail Adams share this status almost entirely because of Abigail’s letters, a correspondence Gelles (Gender Studies/Stanford Univ.; Abigail Adams: A Writing Life, 2002, etc.) rightly terms the revolutionary era’s “best historical record written by a woman.” In letters to her husband, children and friends like Mercy Warren, James Lovell and Thomas Jefferson, Abigail revealed her liveliness, strong affections, abiding faith and keen intelligence, all crucial to maintaining a marriage marked by frequent forced separations. Certain passages from this epistolary treasure have become famous: Abigail’s eyewitness description of the Battle of Bunker Hill, her disquisition against slavery, her proto-feminist plea to her husband, occupied with theories of government at the Continental Congress, to “Remember the Ladies.” Gelles uses these letters and many more—including John’s to Abigail—to construct a moving picture of a marriage whose terms required constant renegotiation as events forced each partner to assume or relinquish tasks commonly ascribed to the other sex. Both subscribed to what the author terms their “family myth.” From Braintree to Boston, Paris to London, Philadelphia to Washington, D.C., where they became the first occupants of what would later become known as the White House, the Adams’s story is one of politics interwoven with family life. Notwithstanding some occasional, unfortunate academic locutions (e.g., “gender” used as a verb), Gelles pushes their marriage and family life vividly to the fore. She examines the couples’ shared sorrows—a daughter’s miserable marriage, an alcoholic son—as well as the many triumphs that would have been impossible, but for Abigail’s wise management of her household and solicitous care for her brilliant, deeply insecure husband.
A revealing exploration of an exceptional marriage marked by mutual understanding, empathy and deep love.Pub Date: April 14, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-135387-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2009
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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