For a cradle-to-grave biography free of piety and pathography, start here. For fresh disclosures on this most intensely...
An intriguing take on JFK? Yes. “A Life Like No Other”? Hype.
No unknown scandals or significant surprises spring from these pages. The major qualities that made Jack Kennedy so compelling a figure are here: intelligence, good looks, and charm. New documents—mostly diaries, letters, and oral histories from the JFK Library—allow, however, for the mapping of what the author calls “a hinterland . . . deep, strange and surprising”: John F. Kennedy as a romantic who lived life full-tilt because he correctly feared an early death. Biographer-historian Perret (Eisenhower, 1999, etc.) underscores the similarities between his subject and Lord Byron: Both lacked maternal love and suffered through ill-health in childhood, then as adults lived recklessly, bedded countless women, and inspired a whole generation through idealism and their own untimely deaths. In some ways, Perret depicts a more paradoxical, and sometimes vulnerable, man than the one we thought we knew: The self-mocking wit who reduced a roomful of listeners at a Thanksgiving celebration by mournfully singing “September Song”; a nominal Catholic who sought consolation in faith as his infant son Patrick lay dying; an avatar of youth and vigor who fretted over the jowly chin created by his medication. Kennedy’s charisma is shrewdly assessed (it combined “the two essential traits of the movie star—emotional power and psychological authority”), as is the impact of Addison’s disease and chronic back problems on his outlook and career. Unfortunately, though, Perret’s summaries of his subject’s character are filled with platitudes (“At eighteen, youth takes as its right a sense of being eternal, even when surrounded by the solicitous in white coats”), or by redundancies (notably, the stress on JFK’s penchant for speeding). Worse, Perret does not adequately explain why he dismisses some claims about the Kennedys (such as Joe Sr.’s illegal business practices) while accepting others (abortions procured by JFK for three different lovers).
For a cradle-to-grave biography free of piety and pathography, start here. For fresh disclosures on this most intensely examined president, turn elsewhere.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-50363-3
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2001
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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