Vividly recounts the price of inflexibility and political failure in times of crisis.
A portrait of Abraham Lincoln’s vice president and successor over six crucial weeks that preserved a nation but brought an administration to ruin.
Means, a senior editor at Washingtonian magazine, zeroes in on the aftermath of Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865 to track Andrew Johnson as he completed a seemingly fated transition from promising patriot to bull in his own china shop. So ultimately eclipsed was his promise, in fact, that most readers may have little awareness of the once-acclaimed virtues that propelled the former congressman, senator and governor into his leadership role. The author questions whether any person other than Lincoln himself could have sealed the victory and healed the wounds of our Civil War, then amply shows how Johnson, determined as he was to faithfully implement Lincoln’s legacy as he saw it, was far less than the man for the job. Not that the deck wasn’t stacked against him: A Tennessee Democrat, he was never accepted by key Republicans in the administration—some, including Lincoln’s widow, Mary, actually suspected the 17th president to be a conspirator in the assassination plot—and he was vehemently hated by the Southern plantocracy. To make matters worse, Johnson had delivered an embarrassingly rambling vice-presidential inaugural address stone drunk—an ironic misstep for someone with a reputation as a mesmerizing “stump” speaker built over countless campaigns. His persistent stubbornness and inability to find common ground with Congress on an effective Reconstruction policy left the South in an economic shambles with four million refugees (a hundred times the number created by Katrina, Means points out). And with full enfranchisement of freed slaves ultimately left to the states that had originally enslaved them, a civil-rights gap emerged and dragged tragically on for a century.
Vividly recounts the price of inflexibility and political failure in times of crisis.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-15-101212-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2006
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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