Though disconnected, an interesting defense of the 1950s work of columnists Joe and Stewart Alsop. Syndicated columnist Yoder (The Night of the Old South Ball, not reviewed) aims to analyze a potential paradox: Did the influential Alsops' militant anticommunism in foreign policy contradict their ``gallant defense of political civility and civil liberties at home... Were they fighting a fire that they themselves had helped to set?'' To answer, the author mixes biography and history. He first notes that Joe Alsop claimed to have invented the ``domino theory'' and describes how Alsop, unlike some latter-day pundits, believed that not only should a column include new information, but it should also be based on firsthand reporting. Then Yoder steps back to describe the brothers, who grew up as Connecticut Valley gentry, relatives of the Roosevelts: Joe was argumentative, foppish, doomsaying, eccentric; Stewart, four years younger, was far more mundane. Then Yoder covers several controversies, such as the question of ``who lost China.'' Yankee progressives with impeccable anticommunist pedigrees, the Alsops emerged as ``relentless critics'' of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, favoring instead a blue-ribbon panel to probe internal security questions. Yoder also recounts how Joe Alsop deconstructed the spurious claims of Louis Budenz, a former Communist functionary who claimed before Congress that two China experts were Communist dupes. After dealing with the Alsops' defense of the improperly accused J. Robert Oppenheimer, Yoder tells of the growing tensions in the brothers' partnership (which ended in 1958) and of the Soviet Union's attempt to blackmail the homosexual Joe. Then he defends Joe Alsop's 1961 columns on the ``missile gap,'' suggesting they were more sober than others thought. The author's conclusion: The Alsops' views were no paradox, but mostly complementary. He adds an appendix with three columns, plus a useful bibliographic essay. Useful mainly to journalists and history buffs. (First serial to Civilization)
Pub Date: March 31, 1995
ISBN: 0-8078-2190-X
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Univ. of North Carolina
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
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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