This vivid, insightful account gives Paine his due, but he remains an outlier to our founders.
A fine biography of one of America’s greatest polemicists.
Thomas Paine (1736-1809) was a poor, self-educated craftsman and writer born in Britain, writes prolific historian Unger (Doctor Benjamin Rush: The Founding Father Who Healed a Wounded Nation, 2018, etc.), former distinguished fellow at George Washington’s Mount Vernon. Paine arrived in America in 1774 with letters of recommendation from Benjamin Franklin and found a job as editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine. When his pamphlet Common Sense appeared in January 1776 as the Revolution was underway, it went viral, perhaps “the greatest publishing success of the 18th century and, in many ways, the most important publishing event since Martin Luther’s 95 Theses that provoked the Reformation.” Unlike typical prolix 18th-century writing, it’s an easy read even today, and its fiery denunciation of Britain made Paine, Unger maintains, the second most popular Revolutionary figure. Americans also devoured The American Crisis, 16 inspirational pamphlets published between 1776 and 1783. Thrilled with the French Revolution, Paine also wrote Rights of Man, another fierce polemic that delighted American supporters of the Revolution (the Democrats) but not those opposed (Federalists). Traveling to France, he fell afoul of Robespierre; imprisoned in 1793, he barely escaped the guillotine. In prison, he began writing The Age of Reason, which praised Jesus’ teaching but criticized organized religions and described the Bible as a collection of myths. Educated Enlightenment figures such as Jefferson and Franklin held similar beliefs, but unlike other religious writing, Paine’s prose was crystal-clear and his book cheap. The masses snapped it up and were outraged. Reviled for atheism and shunned by the establishment, he died in obscurity, from which he is only now emerging. Historians, Unger included, now consider Paine as central to the Revolution as Washington and Jefferson, but The Age of Reason killed his chance of entering semidivinity as a Founding Father in the popular mind.
This vivid, insightful account gives Paine his due, but he remains an outlier to our founders.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-306-92193-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
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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