A dramatic, expertly paced biography of American history’s most problematic figure.
“For drama, controversy, and historical impact, the life of John Brown exceeds that of any other private citizen of the United States.” Thus begins a bold account of the mastermind behind the raid on the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry.
By book’s end, readers will be fully persuaded that the author’s provocative opening salvo has the added virtue of being true. Where David Reynolds’s remarkable John Brown, Abolitionist (2005) highlighted the cultural currents that helped shape the steadfast ideologue whose armed resistance to the southern slave power helped ignite the Civil War, Carton (English/Univ. of Texas, Austin) focuses on what it must have been like to have been Brown. No easy task, and in less sure hands may have been a half-baked historical novel or a bloodless clinical analysis. Instead, we get a rare humanizing of an icon. The grandson of a Revolutionary War veteran and son of a strict Calvinist, the deeply religious Brown appears to have pledged early on to oppose slavery adamantly. He sublimated this vow throughout his varied career as a failed scholar, farmer, breeder, shepherd, tanner, trader and land speculator, but as the national debate grew increasingly convulsive throughout the 1840s and ’50s, Brown sharpened his involvement in the abolitionist movement. He became especially notorious as Captain Brown, leader of militia forces that murdered pro-slavery citizens in Pottawatomie, Kan. Utterly devoid of racial prejudice, he appears to have deeply impressed all who actually met him, even bitter opponents. Although his poor business savvy constantly kept his family near poverty, Brown’s unwavering rectitude and tender solicitude bound each of his two wives and 20 children firmly to all his enterprises, including the failed attempt to incite a slave rebellion that resulted in the death of two sons and his own hanging. Though Carton addresses the “meaning” of John Brown’s life and death, he truly excels at portraying the man himself.
A dramatic, expertly paced biography of American history’s most problematic figure.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-7136-X
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2006
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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