An essential American philosopher and president gains a substantive treatment.
A workmanlike study of the checks-and-balances Founding Father from Virginia.
Broadwater (History/Barton Coll.; George Mason, Forgotten Founder, 2006, etc.) asserts the need for another appraisal of James Madison (1751–1836) as more than a “disembodied brain” who wrote many of the Federalist Papers and pushed hard for the adoption of the Constitution. After the succession of excellent Madison biographers Drew McCoy, Ralph Ketcham, Lance Banning and Jack Rakove, Broadwater organizes his more “modest” effort by facets dear to his subject, such as religious freedom and the party system. The first of 12 children born to a wealthy plantation owner, Madison became a religious scholar at Princeton, suffering a delicate constitution (however living to a very old age). As an elected delegate, he was enlisted to help draft the provision on religious freedom for the prototypical Virginia Declaration of Rights in 1776. Cementing an important relationship with governor Thomas Jefferson, Madison was 29 years old when he was first elected to Congress, sent to Philadelphia to amend the Articles of the Confederation at a tumultuous time in the young nation’s history. Madison recognized the need for Constitutional reform early on, ordering in 1786 a “library cargo” of political history of the Greeks, Swiss, Dutch and Germans for model confederacies. The process of hammering out compromises in Philadelphia drew out his concerns about checks and balances in protecting minority rights, about which he elaborated famously in the Federalist Papers. Once the Constitution was ratified, he decided to support a Bill of Rights after all, and won Congressional election against James Monroe. Madison helped forge the Republican Party and remained an implacable foe of Great Britain, which led to the War of 1812, dominating his two-term presidency. His wife Dolley Payne, a lively widow he married in his middle age, defined the role of First Lady.
An essential American philosopher and president gains a substantive treatment.Pub Date: March 16, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8078-3530-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Univ. of North Carolina
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 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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