An absorbing study of an undeservedly forgotten president.
Slender but deftly sketched assessment of our 22nd and 24th president.
Physically imposing in life, Grover Cleveland is largely forgotten now, except for the oddity that he was the only president to have served two nonconsecutive terms in office (1885–89 and 1893–97). He deserves better from historians, argues Graff (Professor Emeritus, History/Columbia Univ.), who points out Cleveland’s political domination of his time: a politician of integrity, sincerity, and decency at a time of widespread political corruption. As such, Cleveland won the popular vote for president three times in a row—he lost the electoral vote to Benjamin Harrison in 1888—and was revered by millions of his contemporaries. Compelled to forego college after the early death of his father, the young Cleveland settled down to read law in Buffalo. Cleveland quickly rose to prominence as a Buffalo attorney, and his close relationship with influential New York Democratic kingmaker Daniel Manning resulted in short, successful stints as mayor of Buffalo and governor of New York. In these early jobs, he established the themes of sound administration, resistance to pork-barrel politics, and general fairness that distinguished him later as president. In that office, he saw civil-service reform of government and articulated a foreign policy of fair play—he disapproved of the coup that overthrew the Hawaiian monarchy, for instance—that contrasted with the imperialism of successor Teddy Roosevelt. In Graff’s study, striking differences between Cleveland’s era and ours emerge: pretending disinterest while subordinates ran the campaign, Cleveland and his opponents passively “stood” for office instead of running for it. In addition, Cleveland was a “gray personality” whose coarse appearance, heavy body, and unspectacular memorized speeches might have disqualified him for the presidency in the age of television. Graff does not see Cleveland as a visionary figure, but as a transition between the 19th century’s ideal of a limited presidency and our more expansive modern view of the office.
An absorbing study of an undeservedly forgotten president.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2002
ISBN: 0-8050-6923-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
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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