An ambitious, impressively researched history, though the writing tends toward the ploddingly scholarly.
A massively thorough survey of the formation of the U.S. Foreign Service, from Benjamin Franklin’s early efforts to convince European powers to back the colonists’ cause to Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens’ tragic death in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012.
Created as an arm of the executive branch, the U.S. Department of Foreign Affairs was conceived in 1781. For one “glorious moment” in 1784, the diplomatic team for the fledgling U.S. in Paris was represented by Franklin, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, their missions being to instill confidence abroad for the young nation, negotiate treaties, open markets and protect U.S. seamen overseas, among other duties. With the ratification of the Constitution, the U.S. Department of State was formally created, and it reported only to the president, with Thomas Jefferson serving as the first secretary of state. Despite the ensuing rocky relations between Britain and France, one high point of diplomatic negotiation included the bargaining for the Louisiana Territory with Napoleon, while an early foreign-service “professional,” William Brown Hodgson, with his quick study of Arabic, helped to anchor the growing nation by establishing relations with the Ottoman Empire. Moskin (Mr. Truman's War: The Final Victories of World War II and the Birth of the Postwar World, 1998, etc.) gallops chronologically over the decades to pin some of the milestones in foreign-service evolution, such as the ongoing correction of the “spoils system” (awarding political cronies and big donors with consulates) in favor of service meritocracy. The author looks at the many hotspots around the world where diplomacy has been crucial in resolving debates concerning expansion, slavery and empire, from Mexico to China to Russia to the “diplomacy of oil” in the Middle East.
An ambitious, impressively researched history, though the writing tends toward the ploddingly scholarly.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-03745-9
Page Count: 816
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
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
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