Justly returns our attention to Adams—though liberal readers will prefer Mark Puls’s 2006 biography, which emphasizes his...
Neocon view of the least-known Founding Father, arguing that his religious beliefs fueled his revolutionary ardor and, in today’s more secular America, have denied him his due from historians.
By the time this tendentious biography ends, it’s evident—to the author, at least—that Samuel Adams (1722–1803) would gleefully have supported firearms in every living room, prayer in the public schools and the invasion of Iraq. New York Sun managing editor Stoll does not display his conservative cards plainly until the end, but it’s patent that this is no disinterested analysis. However, it does provide the basic information. Adams’s father sold beer malt and was also christened Samuel (hence the name of today’s popular brand of brew). Before hostilities erupted, Adams the younger was a fiery journalist writing under a variety of pen names who made invaluable contributions to the revolution. Indeed, he was there on its opening day: Hiding from the British in Lexington, Adams and John Hancock quite literally heard, but did not see, the shot heard ’round the world. Before and after independence, Adams devoted much of his life to public service, as a representative to both Continental Congresses, a state legislator, lieutenant governor and governor of Massachusetts, whose constitution he helped frame. He never held national office. Stoll quotes frequently from Adams’s journalism and correspondence, making certain that readers are aware of nearly everything he ever wrote that alluded to the Bible—he liked to compare America’s revolutionaries with the biblical Israelites—or revealed his belief that religion should be at the heart of American life. Adams’s last known letter was to Thomas Paine, chiding him for his work on the skeptical The Age of Reason.
Justly returns our attention to Adams—though liberal readers will prefer Mark Puls’s 2006 biography, which emphasizes his role as a rabble-rousing man of the common people.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-7432-9911-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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
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