A fine addition to shelves of historians and Lincoln aficionados, though it may lack wider appeal.
Historian Emerson (Lincoln the Inventor, 2009, etc.) produces a new biography of President Lincoln’s eldest son, Robert Todd Lincoln (1843–1926).
Abraham Lincoln is a seemingly inexhaustible subject for authors and scholars, with some 15,000 books written about him since 1865. This fascination may help explain this new biography of his son, who became a successful attorney, presidential cabinet member, minister to Great Britain and businessman. Emerson has written or edited three previous books on the Lincolns, and he does a thorough job on a relatively minor figure; Lincolniana completists will certainly welcome it. The more mundane facts here—such as the younger Lincoln’s grades at Harvard as the nation headed toward the Civil War—may not engage casual readers, nor will an overlong section detailing Lincoln’s opinions on various biographies of his father. But other subjects are more compelling, such as his complicated relationship with his troubled mother and his committing her to a sanitarium. Also intriguing are the odd coincidences that peppered Lincoln’s life. For example: He was once rescued from being crushed by a train by bystander Edwin Booth, brother of the man who would soon murder his father at Ford’s Theatre; in 1881, while serving as Secretary of War, he was present when President James Garfield was gunned down in Washington, D.C.; in 1901, he arrived at the Pan-American Exposition shortly after President William McKinley was shot there. It bears noting, however, that Robert Lincoln was a rather low-key Victorian gentleman who once said, “My father was a great man, but I am not.” Some readers may wonder whether he would have deemed himself worthy of a comprehensive biography, if he were not the son of arguably the greatest president in American history.
A fine addition to shelves of historians and Lincoln aficionados, though it may lack wider appeal.Pub Date: May 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8093-3055-3
Page Count: 638
Publisher: Southern Illinois Univ.
Review Posted Online: March 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2012
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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