In contrast to his last subject, the vainglorious Douglas MacArthur (Old Soldiers Never Die, 1996), military historian Perret profiles the Union commander as an unassuming strategist ahead of his time and as a president whose abysmal standing deserves re- evaluation. The facts of Grant's life, familiar enough to Civil War aficionados, are retold here, from his service in the Mexican War, to the ennui that temporarily ended his army career in 1854 and left him a clerk in his family's store in Galena, Ill., to his blissful four-decade marriage to wife Julia. What distinguishes this narrative are Perret's bristling style and his skillful blend of tactical analysis and conventional biography. Like his hero, Perret prefers to stay on the offensive, in this case against William McFeely's Pulitzer Prizewinning Grant (1981) for its allegations of the general's sporadic insubordination, drunkenness on several occasions, and perjured deposition on behalf of an aide during his presidency. On the contrary, Perret claims, as a person Grant displayed unimpeachable integrity, and as a general he exhibited a penetrating intelligence, a driving will, and an eerie calm at the center of war's storm. One wishes for a stronger admission of Grant's shortcomings (even the disastrous assault on Cold Harbor is blamed on General George Meade). But Perret outlines, in admirably clear prose, Grant's mastery of the ``wide envelopment'' movement, and his gamble in the Vicksburg campaign to cut loose from his supply line. He even makes a convincing case that, for all the scandals embroiling subordinates, Grant as president had successes (e.g., smashing the Ku Klux Klan). But most of all, Perret persuasively presents a man who endured and conquered all: binge drinking, rivals, false friends, and even the cancer that could not stop him from completing his memoirs (which, Perret notes, ``have the directness and limpidity of the purest English prose''). A shrewd, if insistent, brief for Grant as his era's most imaginative and resourceful master of war. (16 pages b&w photos)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-679-44766-0
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1997
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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