A fine examination of a life, well deserving a place alongside David McCullough’s study of Adams père.
A neglected president receives his due as a statesman and practical politician.
John Quincy Adams (1767–1848), writes Unger (American Tempest: How the Boston Tea Party Sparked a Revolution, 2011, etc.), bridged the years between George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. He ate with Charles Dickens, ended the War of 1812, shaped the ever-so-slightly misnamed Monroe Doctrine, taught at Harvard, and was one of the most prominent abolitionist leaders in the years preceding the Civil War. On top of that, his father was the nation’s second president. So why is he not better known? The short answer is that he didn’t trumpet his own accomplishments. The longer answer is that American history is so badly taught these days that it seems surprising that anyone remembers Washington, much less Millard Fillmore. Unger’s bracing, readable text is a remedy. In the early chapters, the author explores the difficult job of being first son to the Massachusetts first family. In one telling anecdote, John Adams demanded that the boy be admitted to Harvard as a junior or senior, given “his mastery of two classical and three modern languages, and his command of an enormous body of classical and modern literature, philosophy, and science.” The doting aside, Adams fils soon cut a political figure all his own, deftly serving as a diplomat and analyst of what today we would call geopolitics. His fruitful term as ambassador to the court of the tsar even led his compatriots in Washington to call him an alien, “especially after John Quincy began walking in the winter weather wearing his exotic Russian fur hat and great coat.” Unger writes appreciatively of Adams’ considerable accomplishments, even if the voters of the president’s own time were less generous, turning him out of office in favor of the restive war hero Andrew Jackson.
A fine examination of a life, well deserving a place alongside David McCullough’s study of Adams père.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-306-82129-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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