Biographer and financial expert Grant (Mr. Market Miscalculates: The Bubble Years and Beyond, 2008, etc.) takes the measure of “Czar” Reed, the Gilded Age giant of the Congress.
The great John Singer Sargent painted him; the peerless Augustus Saint-Gaudens sculpted him. Both felt obliged to apologize for not quite capturing the essence of Thomas Brackett Reed (1839–1902), the powerful House Speaker. Of the Sargent portrait, the inveterately sardonic Reed remarked: “I hope my enemies are satisfied.” Where artistic geniuses before him have faltered, it seems churlish to censure Grant for failing to give us the man in full, particularly as he writes with great verve about the political issues that dominated Reed’s era. The author effectively demystifies economic arcana—protective tariff, gold standard, bimetallism, etc.—to breezily instruct readers in the intra-Congress, parliamentary maneuvering and mastery of the rules for which the Speaker is best remembered, even to account for Reed’s unlikely late-life apostasy on issues like women’s suffrage and imperialism. Solving the private Reed, though, poses a difficult problem for Grant—indeed, for any biographer looking to pierce the legendary imperiousness that both attracted and repelled colleagues and constituents. Reed’s massive frame, opaque gaze, formidable intellect and lacerating wit kept contemporaries at arm’s length. He was respected, even feared, but never loved. Notwithstanding his fiercely partisan party service, fellow Republicans preferred the likes of the charismatic and thoroughly dishonest James G. Blaine or the amiable, relentlessly ordinary William McKinley for the presidency. Incorruptible in an era notorious for corruption, Reed, nevertheless, was no earnest reformer in the mode of, say, Democrat Grover Cleveland. He was a fatalist about the business cycle and about mankind, and had “no interest in instructing the impure.” He loathed humbug and grandiloquence, severe handicaps for a politician. Asked in 1896 about his chances for the presidential nomination, Reed responded, “They could do worse—and probably will.”
Flawed, yes, but likely to become the standard biography, at least for now.
Pub Date: May 10, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4165-4493-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2011
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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