A highly readable, often insightful analysis of an unequaled prose master for whom writing was “the supreme artifact of...
How the 16th president used—and transformed—the English language.
Famously self-taught, Lincoln’s understanding of and familiarity with the language depended to a large degree on his reading, and Kaplan (The Singular Mark Twain, 2003, etc.) offers a thorough survey of all the sources that informed the young autodidact. From early influences like the Bible and Dilworth’s Speller, to particular favorites like Poe’s “The Raven,” to the Enlightenment essayists and poets Pope and Milton, to Romantics Burns and Byron and, above all, Shakespeare, Lincoln heard background rhythms he would later masterfully adapt to his own emerging personal voice. Kaplan looks at halting childhood exercises; early political speeches and circulars; love letters and letters to friends; stabs at poetry (overpraised by Kaplan); eulogies for Zachary Taylor and Henry Clay; addresses to Congress; and even a brief to the Supreme Court in Broadwell v. Lewis. The author effectively demonstrates how Lincoln brought elements of his own personality—melancholy and humor, lawyerly precision and clarity, down-to-earth language and intellectual intensity—to prose that came to be defined as quintessentially American. Although the immortal presidential addresses receive scant attention here—perhaps because they’ve been exhaustively covered in fine books like Harold Holzer’s Lincoln at Cooper Union: The Speech That Made Abraham Lincoln President (2004) and Garry Wills’s Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America (1992)—by the time Kaplan places Lincoln in the White House, readers require no further guide to Lincoln’s methods, nor any further convincing about the man’s linguistic brilliance.
A highly readable, often insightful analysis of an unequaled prose master for whom writing was “the supreme artifact of human genius.”Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-077334-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2008
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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