The surprisingly dreary product of 15 years of painstaking research, Sweeney's first book is a flat biography of the legendary Apache chief. Cochise was undoubtedly one of the greatest warrior chiefs in Native American history, fierce in battle and a capable leader, and, as Sweeney notes, no book-length biography of this dynamo exists—making the inadequacies of Sweeney's account all the more unfortunate. The son of a chief, Cochise grew to maturity in the then-Mexican-ruled Southwest during a period of relative tranquillity. Each breach of the peace brought a swift response, however, and rapid spirals of retaliation and revenge hampered any prospects of a lasting cease-fire. The increasing Anglo-American presence over the years, with its own territorial claims, gave the Apaches even more reason to fight to retain their way of life. A particularly misguided effort by the US Army in 1861 to recover a captive white boy by taking Apache hostages, Cochise and his brother among them, ended in bloodshed and executions on both sides, and Cochise's War was on in earnest. For nearly a decade, Cochise terrorized Americans and Mexicans in the region with assaults and ambushes, showing consummate skill as a strategist, until finally hounded into accepting a truce and reservation life in the early 1870's. He died soon after, an old man at peace, even though his struggle was taken up subsequently by Geronimo and others. Extensive notes and full use of sources readily indicate Sweeney's depth of research, but a frequent repetition of basic facts and lack of editorial judgment compromise any sense of scholarly achievement. History becomes a record of troop movements and body counts, creating the dullest of chronologies, while hazy conjecture about Cochise's undocumented activities proves a slippery supplement to more concrete information. Lackluster and grindingly detailed, albeit sympathetic toward its subject.
Pub Date: May 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-8061-2337-0
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Univ. of Oklahoma
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1991
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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