A fine appreciation—and explanation—of freedom’s champion.
A veteran biographer specializing in the Founding Fathers offers a short, sharp life of the Virginia patriot.
Most Americans know Patrick Henry only for his 1775 “liberty or death” speech. Like his northern counterpart, Samuel Adams, he was a driving force for independence who never received the first-tier historical treatment reserved for only a handful of the Founders. Unger (The Last Founding Father: James Monroe and a Nation’s Call to Greatness, 2009, etc.) offers a few reasons why. First, notwithstanding his service in the House of Burgesses, his distinction as Virginia’s first governor and his election three more times to that office, Henry was always something of an outsider, a kind of Andrew Jackson Democrat before there was such a thing. He made his name as a defender of the common people, an eloquent, unusually effective attorney in the state’s Piedmont area. Though he always retained the healthy regard of Washington and John Marshall, Henry stood apart from the rest of the Tidewater aristocracy that ruled Virginia and later the nation. Second, though he frequently inserted himself in the raging political battles of his era, Henry was not as consumed by politics as, say, Jefferson or Madison. He preferred his thriving legal practice, large family and wide circle of friends. He bought and sold numerous properties and frequently relocated his home plantation, despite debilitating illnesses that plagued him most of his adult life. Finally, with the Revolution won and the new nation organizing itself years later under the proposed Constitution, Henry opposed ratification, thundering against the surrender of liberty to a federal authority, a stance that prevented his joining Washington’s administration. Though he later softened his criticisms of the federal government, his health had so deteriorated that he declined Washington’s numerous offers of high office, posts which might well have further burnished his name.
A fine appreciation—and explanation—of freedom’s champion.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-306-81886-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: July 23, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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