Fine slice of American military and revolutionary history—good for commodores in the making, too.
Sturdy, seaworthy life of the Scottish-born hero of the American Revolution, whom John Adams characterized as “the most ambitious and intriguing officer in the American Navy.”
Jones, already a legend in his early 30s thanks to his daring exploits aboard the Bonhomme Richard, wasn’t exactly forgotten at the end of the Revolution, although he felt ill-used when Congress ignored his offer to establish a naval academy and make America a maritime power and instead auctioned off the Continental Navy’s few surviving frigates. He was given to mercurial moods and feelings of persecution anyway, writes Newsweek assistant managing editor Thomas (Robert Kennedy, 2000, etc.), very much like his contemporary Benedict Arnold, whom Thomas considers to have been Jones’s “closest rival . . . for drive and resourcefulness”—adding that “unlike Arnold, Jones remained steadfast to the American cause,” though both complained about official indifference to their brilliance and about “commands offered and withdrawn.” Jones therefore stalked off to Paris after the war against England, where he nursed his wounds before finding work as an admiral in the navy of the Russian tsarina Catherine the Great. There, he found himself embroiled in political intrigues of many kinds, though his undoing would prove to be an unseemly encounter with a 12-year-old girl that naturally enough, “left him vulnerable to scandal.” Shunned and disgraced, he returned to Paris, where he died in 1792 at the age of 45—just a few days, ironically enough, before a commission arrived from Congress for him to go and have sharp words with the Dey of Algiers about the matter of the Barbary Pirates. Thomas’s account of these events—and whether Jones ever really said “I have not yet begun to fight”—is skillfully rendered, and his blend of period detail and modern psychobiography just right for the job.
Fine slice of American military and revolutionary history—good for commodores in the making, too.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-0583-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2003
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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