A thoroughly readable, scrupulously fair assessment of the one president who could inspire a Mt. Rushmore makeover.
Prolific historian Brands (History/Univ. of Texas; The Money Men: Capitalism, Democracy, and the Hundred Years’ War Over the American Dollar, 2006, etc.) turns his well-honed biographer’s eye to FDR.
Although the progressive administrations of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson had chipped away at the excesses of capitalism, no peacetime executive in American history attempted to wield power as fully as FDR. Upon taking office in 1932 and facing a worldwide economic depression, he pledged to ask Congress “for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis—broad executive power…as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.” Brands focuses on Roosevelt’s bold, persistent, not always successful New Deal experimentation to save capitalism from itself and to preserve democracy. Born into every conceivable advantage, FDR—particularly after his midlife polio affliction—became the unlikely tribune of the common man, earning the scorn of those wary of veiled socialism and, later, as war loomed, those fearful of dangerous international entanglements. Brands considers Roosevelt’s career (which roughly mimicked his cousin Theodore’s) at every stage—state senator, assistant secretary of the Navy, vice presidential candidate, governor—but devotes most of the narrative to his unprecedented four-term presidency. By the time it ended, Roosevelt had so transformed the office and the country that not even his fiercest critics dared attempt to roll back the change. The author explains the birth of that era and how the vast expansion of the federal government and executive power was attributable to the imagination, discipline, drive and, to the great frustration of his enemies, popularity of the 20th century’s most consequential president. Even though Brands’s evenhanded treatment—he’s forthright about FDR’s inveterate duplicity, his overreaching and his gobbling up of the personal and professional lives of those closest to him—fails to add much new information, his book will likely be the go-to popular biography for quite some time.
A thoroughly readable, scrupulously fair assessment of the one president who could inspire a Mt. Rushmore makeover.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-385-51958-8
Page Count: 752
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2008
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
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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