A sturdy and necessary biography of a politically principled man who is sadly fading into obscurity.
The executive chairman of superstore chain Meijer, Inc. offers a detailed and admiring biography of Arthur Vandenberg (1884-1951), who played key roles in forming U.S. policy throughout the early decades of the 20th century.
Meijer, who has published a biography of his grandfather (Thrifty Years: The Life of Hendrik Meijer, 1984) and produced a documentary about Vandenberg (America’s Senator, 2011), has done a thorough job collecting and examining the pieces of the story of the Michigan Republican who served in the Senate from 1928 to 1951. In a text that moves with resolute chronology, the author notes the senator’s significant involvement in many important U.S. policy initiatives, including the United Nations, NATO, and the Marshall Plan. Although Vandenberg was initially an isolationist, he gradually changed his tune; by the end of his career, he was singing his full-throated support of America as an international leader. As Meijer demonstrates, Vandenberg worked across the aisle, which was a necessary strategy during the Franklin Roosevelt years when the Democrats held majorities in both houses. Vandenberg worked with fellow senators, Roosevelt, and President Harry Truman. The author also shows us a man with a wandering eye. Although he was twice married (his first wife died), he seems to have had an extended fling with another woman. The author describes and speculates but does not condemn these deeds, but he does suggest they could have been factors in his decision not to campaign more earnestly for the 1948 presidential nomination. Meijer gives us a portrait of a politician with somewhat of an old-school manner; he was an orator, a backroom master, and a strategist who loved hearing good things about himself (are their politicians who don’t?). Principally, he shows us a man who believed in working with rather than condemning his colleagues.
A sturdy and necessary biography of a politically principled man who is sadly fading into obscurity.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-226-43348-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
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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