Unlikely to rehabilitate Harding by itself, but a useful view of the long-forgotten leader.
Brief account of a failed, scandal-ridden presidency, seen through the eyes of someone quite familiar with such things.
“Warren G. Harding is best known as America’s worst president,” admits Dean, himself best known as Richard Nixon’s former counsel and a reluctant star of the Watergate hearings 30 years ago. In this volume of the American Presidents series, however, the author professes something of an affective claim on Harding, if only because they share the hometown of Marion, Ohio. Laboring valiantly to prove that the man infamous for his largely posthumous connection to the Teapot Dome scandal of 1923 does not quite merit the worst-president epithet, Dean credits Harding, who was inaugurated in 1921, for being unusually forward-thinking in his views on civil rights and social welfare. He was also, Dean writes, a highly effective practical politician who had few personal enemies (except for his wife’s father, who in this account personifies everything bad about small-town capitalism) and valued consensus-building at all levels of government. The author credits Harding for braving unpopularity by taking a consistently conservative stand on fiscal matters, as when he risked damaging his career by refusing to pay a bonus to WWI veterans, though Dean overreaches by writing that this refusal “helped to usher in the booming economy of the roaring twenties.” Whatever his merits, Harding unwisely surrounded himself with self-serving counselors, among them a treasury secretary who brokered tax breaks for the wealthy, an interior secretary who enriched himself by selling off favors and titles from the public domain, and a veteran’s affairs administrator who looted his department’s budget. Although Harding served only 882 days in office before dying of a stroke, his relationship with those men and assorted other wrongdoers has served to tarnish his reputation ever since, even if, as Dean insists, none of the associated criminal investigations “implicated Warren Harding in any corrupt activity or wrongdoing.”
Unlikely to rehabilitate Harding by itself, but a useful view of the long-forgotten leader.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2004
ISBN: 0-8050-6956-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2003
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
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
