Smartly conceived, beautifully wrought campaign history, bound to entertain and inform.
Pulitzer Prize–winner Larson (Evolution: The Remarkable History of a Scientific Theory, 2004, etc.) vividly recounts America’s first overtly partisan election.
In 1799, the single man capable of papering over the young republic’s widening political divisions died in retirement at Mount Vernon. There had been no open campaign to succeed Washington in 1796 when the electoral provisions of the untested Constitution uncomfortably yoked Federalist President John Adams to Vice-President Thomas Jefferson, the acknowledged leader of the opposition Republicans. Now, the two prepared to face off in what became, and remains, the most vituperative and dramatic of all U.S. elections. Through newspapers, letters and speeches, Republicans hammered Federalists for offenses amounting to a betrayal of the revolution: their sponsorship of the Alien and Sedition Acts, their support of a standing army, their too-friendly disposition toward organized religion and their dangerous sympathies for monarchy. In turn, Federalists, badly split over Adams’s leadership, assailed Republicans for their godlessness and blind devotion to liberty at the expense of the public order and national defense, issues brought into high relief by the bloody excesses of the French Revolution. The colorful cast of Founders included Madison, Jay, Pinckney, Monroe and Samuel Adams; the behind-the-scenes machinations of High Federalist leader Alexander Hamilton and Republican organizer Aaron Burr were especially dramatic. Larson (History/Univ. of Georgia and Pepperdine Univ.) does justice to them all and demonstrates his storytelling mastery by lucidly recounting the political histories and procedures unique to each state and deftly delineating the issues that dominated the national debate. Astonishingly, the hard-fought, bitterly personal campaign resulted in an Electoral College tie between Jefferson and running-mate Burr, whose maddening refusal to defer to the Sage of Monticello encouraged Federalist mischief. It required 35 Congressional ballots before Jefferson finally prevailed.
Smartly conceived, beautifully wrought campaign history, bound to entertain and inform.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-7432-9316-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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