Decent background on mining and other aspects of American society and industry early in the 20th century, but lacking a...
Sixth historical collaboration from the Ungers (LBJ, 1999, etc.): a scattershot group portrait of the Jewish-American dynasty that included major industrialists and patrons of the arts.
The book’s first and better half chronicles the Guggenheims’ origins in Switzerland and their accumulation of substantial wealth from silver, copper, and other valuable ores after patriarch Meyer Guggenheim emigrated in 1848 to America. Meyer got the family into the mining and smelting business, insisting that all seven of his sons share equally in the responsibilities and rewards. Second son Daniel kept the fortune growing, and, by the standards of the time, the Guggenheims were humane employers, not only in the western US but also in Mexico and Chile. As Daniel’s son Harry moved the family into aviation, publishing and philanthropy, the narrative loses its focus, attempting to cover too many relatives with widely divergent interests over several generations—a family tree is sorely missed. Daniel’s younger brother Solomon and niece Peggy were pioneering advocates of modern art, and the Ungers capably sketch the pair’s achievements without adding anything new to their biographies or to our understanding of their relationship with other Guggenheims. A plethora of further descendants with different last names (offspring of those neglected daughters) also get the thumbnail-sketch treatment, including Harold Loeb (model for the anti-Semitic caricature in The Sun Also Rises) and book publisher Roger Straus Jr. among those about whom we don’t learn much new. The Ungers fail to give a sense of what the family dynamic was, other than being hard on girls, and it’s particularly unsatisfying that they never address the question of why so many of the Guggenheims were married and divorced multiple times.
Decent background on mining and other aspects of American society and industry early in the 20th century, but lacking a coherent thread to make sense of the Guggenheims’ relationship to their nation or to each other.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-018807-3
Page Count: 560
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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
© 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.
