A small survey of many virtues; it holds to the middle ground between hagiography and debunking, making allowances for...
Hero or opportunist? Rebel or terrorist? Did he even own a coonskin cap? Davy Crockett was an enigma in his own age—and certainly the right man in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Retired New York City firefighter Groneman, a veteran of the 9/11 attacks, recognizes that a vast mythmaking enterprise underlay Davy Crockett’s ascent to the status of cultural hero; one series, Davy Crockett’s Almanacs, ran to 45 volumes “of increasingly violent tall tales” and was wildly successful, though, Groneman notes, Crockett made nothing from it. His elevation seems unlikely, for Crockett started off life under a father no more violent or drunk than most fathers on the Appalachian frontier, showed no more aptitude for hard work than any of his peers and commanded no more book-learning than a farmer or freighter or trapper. Still, he distinguished himself by a certain stoical unflappability under fire and good humor, which, witnesses recall, he put to good use during the defense of the Alamo, which sealed his reputation once and for all. The mythmaking, too, was a product of its time, for Crockett happened to come along just when the Founding Fathers were dying off and “the American identity was shifting from the Virginia aristocracy to the common man of the Western frontier.” In this lean an lucid biography, Groneman portrays more of the complicated, haunted David Crockett that Billy Bob Thornton did in the 2004 film The Alamo than did Fess Parker in the 1950s. And as for the coonskin cap—yes, he wore one.
A small survey of many virtues; it holds to the middle ground between hagiography and debunking, making allowances for Crockett’s lapses into bad behavior while highlighting his better qualities.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-765-31067-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2005
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
