A new light on the Roosevelt clan that serves as illumination of the short life of an unhappy man.
An exploration of Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962) and her idealization of the father she hardly knew.
In her autobiography, Eleanor wrote that her father “dominated my life as long as he lived” and “was the love of my life for many years after he died.” TV journalist and social historian Burns (The Golden Lad: The Haunting Story of Quentin and Theodore Roosevelt, 2016, etc.) makes much of that statement, claiming that Elliott Bulloch Roosevelt (1860-1894), Theodore’s younger brother, “influenced her character more than anyone else ever did” and therefore deserves “the most prominent role he has yet known in a book.” Unfortunately, the author is mostly unpersuasive about Elliott’s influence and in his depiction of the “bond” between father and daughter. Burns draws his information largely from Roosevelt biographies by Joseph Lash, Blanche Wiesen Cook, David McCullough, and others and by a cache of letters between Eleanor and Elliott, written over two years, ending with his death when Eleanor was 10. Elliott was a tormented man, moody, depressed, and beset by demons. By the time he married, he was a “full-fledged alcoholic,” and as the years passed, he became addicted, as well, to laudanum and morphine. During Eleanor’s childhood, he was institutionalized several times—dramatic events kept from his daughter—but never cured. He had at least three affairs, one resulting in the birth of a son, and was estranged from his wife and family. Biographers acknowledge that when he was sober, he was a loving parent, far more so than Eleanor’s cold, dismissive mother, but he was hardly involved in her upbringing. From Burns’ evidence, the man she loved was largely imaginary. The author makes the odd decision to organize the dual biography in nonchronological leaps of time to prove that “theirs was a relationship for the ages.” But the alternating chapters offer a familiar portrait of Eleanor, underscoring how vastly different she was from her father.
A new light on the Roosevelt clan that serves as illumination of the short life of an unhappy man.Pub Date: March 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-68177-328-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017
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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