An intelligent, meticulously researched biography of Dean Acheson (1893—1971), who as Harry Truman’s secretary of state became “the most important figure in American foreign policy since John Quincy Adams.” With aristocratic hauteur, decisiveness, command of facts, and biting wit, Acheson could face down dictators, rabid right-wingers, and American presidents. Only now, however, with the collapse of the Iron Curtain and the opening of US and Soviet files, can a proper assessment be made of his achievements and errors. Drawing on these and other sources, World Policy Journal editor Chace provides an evenhanded appraisal. An accomplished lawyer, Acheson came into his own as assistant secretary of state for Franklin Roosevelt, when he played a key role in shaping the Lend Lease and Bretton Woods accords. Chace throws the last pile of dirt on revisionist historians’ contention that Acheson helped precipitate the Cold War, noting that he sought to reach agreement with Josef Stalin until Soviet designs on Europe forced him into pursuing containment. Under Truman, Acheson helped formulate the Marshall Plan and Truman Doctrine and, in what Chace sees as his lasting legacy, brought West Germany into NATO, thus preventing a major continental land war for the last half of the century. While admiring Acheson’s achievements, Chace also notes that his shrill rhetoric encouraged successors— global containment schemes, which this Eurocentric, pragmatic statesman never intended, and that his policies in Asia were less sure-footed than his policies in Europe. He became vulnerable to GOP attacks because of his refusal to condemn Alger Hiss and America’s —loss— of China, yet he retained the unstinting support of Truman. As an elder statesman, Acheson urged John Kennedy to order limited air strikes during the Cuban missile crisis and turned against the Vietnam War as one of Lyndon Johnson’s —wise men.— A skillful biography of one member of a species now seemingly headed toward extinction in Washington: a government titan of remarkable achievement, eloquence, loyalty, and integrity.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-80843-9
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1998
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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