A carefully argued account of the general whom Robert E. Lee affectionately called ``my old war horse''—the same man who in the mythology of the Lost Cause became the scapegoat for the failure of Confederate arms at Gettysburg. Commander of the First Corps in Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, Longstreet (1821-1904) was not only Lee's senior officer but his most reliable—even more so, Wert (Mosby's Rangers, 1990) says, than Stonewall Jackson. Described by a colleague as ``a rock in steadiness when sometimes in battle the world seemed flying to pieces,'' Longstreet served at First and Second Manassas, the Seven Days campaign, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chicamauga, the Wilderness, and the surrender at Appomattox. Lee depended on his counsel, except at Gettysburg, when three times Lee rejected Longstreet's advice not to make the fateful frontal assault. Although ostensibly covering Longstreet's entire life, Wert concentrates on the general's Civil War record, explaining the personality quirks and decisions that made the general, so fearless and beloved during the war, such a lightning rod of controversy in its aftermath. Longstreet excelled at Second Manassas, as well as at Fredericksburg, where his network of trenches, fieldworks, and artillery sealed the doom of thousands of Federals. But unlike Lee, Longstreet questioned the value of the tactical offensive and would risk his men's lives only in a carefully planned attacks with reasonable chances for success. Wert shows that Longstreet's warnings of disaster at Gettysburg were borne out—and he demonstrates that, except for one brief lapse, Longstreet carried out Lee's orders vigorously despite his misgivings. Longstreet's troubles resulted from his postwar decision to join the Republican Party—which made him the Benedict Arnold of the South—and his too-late, too-self-serving defense of his record in his memoirs. A fair, though not uncritical, reappraisal of one of the Civil War's great but maligned soldiers. (Twelve maps, 16 pp. of b&w photographs—not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-671-70921-6
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1993
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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