The peerless travel writer laughs, snarls, glares in contempt, and sheds real tears in a critical but ultimately sentimental biographical essay on the martyred president. After comparing the American adoration of Abraham Lincoln to the sealed plastic, single-portion tubs of grape jelly she took with her toast in roadside coffee shops some 40 years ago on her first visit to the States, Morris (Fifty Years of Europe, 1997, etc.) seems out for blood, or at least better breakfast fare. She finds neither as she visits log cabins of dubious authenticity, Civil War battlefields, public parks, and 19th-century houses spared the wrecking ball because Honest Abe lived and (in a small room across from Ford’s Theater) died in them. Eschewing both Carl Sandburg’s six-volume hagiography and more recent Lincoln scholarship, Morris—quoting mostly from the biased memoirs of Lincoln’s law partner William Herndon and Lincoln’s own letters, poetry, and speeches—discovers what any American high schooler might have told her: that the humble rail-splitter was an astute politician whose law practice represented the railroads— interests, and that the Great Emancipator was initially ambivalent about freeing slaves, possibly because his wife, Mary Todd, came from a slave-owning family. Morris finds it ironic that Lincoln worshipers, from bearded look-alikes at souvenir shops to fat tourists struggling up the marble stairs leading to his Kentucky log- cabin birthplace, ignore the man she’s sure he is: a melancholic, unsophisticated, animal-loving family man whose simple departure speech, which Morris reads at the Springfield railway station where Lincoln left to take up residence at the White House, moves her to tears. “He was essentially a nice man,” she sighs. By the time she visits somber Gettysburg, she is gushing with admiration for a rough-hewn, unrefined, but exquisitely gentle commoner who rose to meet the challenge of his times, and help promote the meddlesome idealism of millennial America. Caustic, patronizing, and misinformed: Lincoln for Dummies.(First serial rights to Preservation)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-85515-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999
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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