A well-researched complement to McCullough’s somewhat more accessible life: of much interest to students of the early...
An agile life of Adams, “the unbeloved ‘president by three votes.’ ”
Historians have been paying greater attention to the hitherto-overlooked second president in the wake of David McCullough’s magisterial John Adams (2001) and the contested presidential election of 2000 (see David Ferling’s John Adams vs. Jefferson, 2004). Financial historian Grant (Money of the Mind, 1992, etc.) focuses on Adams as a politician and revolutionary, but also as an economic thinker and sometimes ambivalent philosopher. Raised a Puritan, for instance, Adams had no lack of work ethic yet was, at least in his youth, “dull, lazy, unobservant, and confused”; when he was supposed to be studying or working, Adams could often be found eating, smoking, “gallanting the girls” or drinking. On the last matter, Adams was especially of two minds; fond of a dram himself, he was unsure whether to campaign against the taverns of Braintree, Massachusetts. Marrying Abigail, with whom he had a tender and playful relationship, was a step in the right direction, and when it came time to draw up the Declaration of Independence, Adams was no stranger to hard work. Grant points out that Adams served on more than 30 congressional committees, was active in drafting American foreign policy, and was constantly on the run even while predicting that he would soon die from sheer exhaustion. Though most of his pages are devoted to events before 1781, Grant gives generous coverage to Adams’s post-revolutionary career, when, first, he became vice president and wrestled with the fundamental cheapness of a people that did not wish to be taxed and a Congress that did not want to spend, then became president—by a slender margin indeed—and faced with difficulties of establishing a secular, democratic government in a God-haunted nation that, even then, was beginning to crack apart under the weight of slavery.
A well-researched complement to McCullough’s somewhat more accessible life: of much interest to students of the early Republic and the revolutionary era.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-374-11314-9
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2004
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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