A few such quibbles are not enough, however, to undermine an otherwise keen, intriguing assessment of how personal politics...
A tantalizing reassessment of America’s earliest foreign policy.
Paul (International and Constitutional Law/Univ. of California, Hastings) explores the network of spies, diplomats and profoundly self-serving aristocrats whose actions helped determine the outcome of the American Revolution. The primary characters are Silas Deane, the Connecticut merchant charged by the Continental Congress to secure financial and military aid from France, and two French counterparts, Beaumarchais, the playwright and inventor, and Chevalier d’Eon, the transgendered officer and secret agent. A web of personal and professional machinations are brought to bear on each of these players as they engineer sometimes duplicitous missions for the French, British and American governments with often unintended but weighty consequences. We learn about the intricacies of Beaumarchais’s covert arrangements with Deane and King Louis XVI to smuggle arms to the Americans; a partnership between Deane and his fellow diplomat, Benjamin Franklin, built as much on a shared interest in the dirty politics of a domestic land-grab scheme as a love of liberty; and the intriguing and self-absorbed political ramifications of d’Eon’s transgendered identity. Paul handles each of these relationships with diligent care, accounting not only for the grand schemes and boisterous actions of his subjects, but also the nuanced textures of their daily lives in revolutionary-era Europe and America. The author keeps a close eye on the weather, fashion and, most importantly, the sense of time—the unreliable and painfully slow pace of trans-Atlantic communication plays heavily into the narrative. Occasionally, the author’s detail work moves from harmless quotidian chronicling to questionable character assessments, as when he asserts that “it was precisely because d'Eon was so readily swayed by her heart's desire, rather than by rational self-interest, that she found herself in this predicament,” as a primary reason that she became alienated from the French king.
A few such quibbles are not enough, however, to undermine an otherwise keen, intriguing assessment of how personal politics might play out on the international stage.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-59448-883-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2009
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
PERSPECTIVES
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