Lincoln completists will want it, but the content and concepts are covered better elsewhere.
More stories may have been told about Abraham Lincoln than any other U.S. president; here’s a representative, somewhat haphazardly chosen batch, showing the popular image of Lincoln as it developed over the years.
Wheeler (Christmas In My Heart series) brings together a variety of pieces, mostly from largely forgotten magazines of the late-19th and early-20th centuries. The implicit goal of those stories was to present Lincoln as a model for young people, much as the George Washington “cherry tree” story did. Typical are several stories of the president learning of a farm boy in the Union Army sentenced to death for sleeping on duty, often substituting for a wounded comrade. Lincoln, full of compassion for the common people, pardoned the offender, who went on to perform heroically later in the war. It’s a touching tale, undoubtedly a true reflection of Lincoln’s character, and odds are it actually happened a few times. The story also tells us something of how the generations immediately after the war thought of Lincoln—as a wise father figure who never lost the common touch or the ability to laugh at himself. But one good tale of a sleeping sentinel should have sufficed. Other stories make similar points—e.g., Lincoln giving a girl a gold piece for her church’s missionary fund, a young Lincoln driving a coach across rough country while rich lawyers rode in comfort. A few, such as William Agnew Paton’s story of himself as a schoolboy interviewing the president, appear to be factual. Others focus on Lincoln’s family, especially his young son. But Wheeler doesn’t appear to have tried to separate true accounts from fiction, and the stories aren’t, on the whole, particularly well-written. The best entries here are probably the ones written closest to Lincoln’s own time, such as Whitman’s “O Captain! My Captain!”
Lincoln completists will want it, but the content and concepts are covered better elsewhere.Pub Date: June 11, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4767-0286-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Howard Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2013
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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