Droll, almost instructive and quite entertaining.
According to this less-than-authoritative history, there was once an American president named Millard Fillmore. Who knew such a clueless, forgettable chief executive could have had such epic adventures?
If we remember anything at all about Millard Fillmore, it is that he is credited with the invention of the rubber band. So asserts Pendle, an inventive biographer in the grand slapstick tradition of Bill Nye, Elbert Hubbard and other forgotten wits. As he tells it, Fillmore’s life was quite remarkable indeed, and very much the archetype for that of an equally powerful intellectual force, the extraordinary Forrest Gump. Based on the recently unearthed first 53 volumes of Fillmore’s journals, the present book fills more pages of Millardian history than any other text properly could. It traces the ascent of the United States’ largely ignored 13th president from back-country primitive and congressional yokel to White House rube and beyond. Throughout, whether under the Whig banner or that of the Know-Nothings, Fillmore never wavered in pursuit of the ephemeral Masonic menace. It’s an addled story, well suited to today’s needs, as we follow the accidental president’s encounters with the likes of Edgar Allan Poe, Samuel F.B. Morse and Ralph Waldo Emerson. From New York to the Alamo, from California to Egypt, feckless Fillmore took part in all the signal events of the 19th century, we discover in this landmark salute to anti-factual historiography. Like a real history, the text is adorned with footnotes of significant dubiety. Appended, though, is a guide to actual factoids upon which the silliness is constructed. Happily, it’s all consistently funny, although like any strong purgative, the comedy might best be taken in small doses. We await Pendle’s next—perhaps a biography of Thurlow Weed, the forgotten Whig wag.
Droll, almost instructive and quite entertaining.Pub Date: April 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-307-33962-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Three Rivers/Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2007
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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