Skims across the surface of a very deep lake. (16 pp. b&w photos, not seen)
A thoroughly researched, though highly chatty and oddly superficial, attempt to rehabilitate the image of FDR’s mother, which was besmirched, the author argues, by less sympathetic Roosevelt biographers.
Pottker (Janet and Jackie: The Story of a Mother and Her Daughter, 2001, etc.) writes for the Princess Di set, for lovers of royals and riches and American dynasties. Here are accounts of who was wearing cream taffeta at which Roosevelt wedding; here are six pages devoted to the 1939 visit to Hyde Park of Queen Elizabeth and King George VI and the spats between Eleanor and Sara about the menu. Here is such a concern for the exteriors of people’s lives (what they wore, where they lived, how their homes were decorated, what they drove, where they traveled, what they bought) that interior lives must almost always be inferred, and then only with difficulty. Pottker just doesn’t want to get into it. Neither, in this strangely prudish account, does she wish to be more than coy about sexual issues. The author tells us that the teenaged Eleanor installed triple interior locks on her bedroom door because of drunken uncles. What does that mean? You won’t find the answer here. Nor does the author give credence to stories that FDR and Lucy Mercer actually had sexual relations. No, she claims, it was just an intimate relationship. Pottker tries to focus on the stories of the two titular women, but that’s hard to do with FDR filling the stage with his charm, his polio, his political successes. And, besides, the author’s principal intent is to reinstall Sara Delano Roosevelt on her pedestal—Sara, the woman who was on the cover of Time before her son (or daughter-in-law), the woman who was the heart and soul and financial officer for the Roosevelt clan. In short: the mother of all matriarchs.
Skims across the surface of a very deep lake. (16 pp. b&w photos, not seen)Pub Date: March 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-312-30340-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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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