An appealing popular history that is happy to follow various byways to flesh out its portrait of the seventh president’s...
A level, intelligent, and thoroughly readable biography of Old Hickory, from historian Buchanan (The Road to Guilford Courthouse, not reviewed).
Though no revisionist, Buchanan does try to put Jackson’s Indian fighting days into perspective in this ranging history of his life through the War of 1812. He suggests that Jackson’s hardscrabble youth (he was reared in the crude, violent backcountry of South Carolina) burned far more hatred in him of the British—who had killed his mother, brothers, and nearly himself—than of the Indians. The author charts his course from young Jackson reading law in North Carolina, through his days as public prosecutor and then understudy to Governor William Blount, through to his command of troops during the Creek Campaign of the War of 1812. The lands that would become Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Florida—originally known as the Old Southwest—hung in the balance: Spain, Britain, and France had toeholds and designs here, and it was their presence (rather than bloodlust) that spurred Jackson on. He himself hardly denied that the fighting was godawful: “The carnage was dreadful,” he said of the battle at Horseshoe Bend. And Buchanan doesn’t play down Jackson’s frequent scorched-earth policy, but rather places it within the parameters of national acquisition. The real strength of this study, however, lies in its thoroughgoing history of colonial-native relations, good and bad, and the quick sketches of the important figures in the bloody conquest of the Old Southwest. Buchanan also does a fine job of explaining the political context of the final battle for Florida, which became a crucial element of Jackson's reputation.
An appealing popular history that is happy to follow various byways to flesh out its portrait of the seventh president’s early years: most readers should be happy to tag along. (17 illustrations, 4 maps)Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-471-28253-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Wiley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
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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