An exhaustive but engaging biography that plumbs the personality of William Tecumseh Sherman—and attempts to explain the Civil War general's personal and military decisions as arising from a psychological need for order and control. Marszalek (History/Mississippi State Univ.) contends that Sherman's rootless childhood—he lost his father at age nine and endured a separation thereafter from his mother and his siblings, while a charitable neighbor, Thomas Ewing, raised him—instilled in him an abhorrence of uncertainty and a craving for control. Sherman's letters make clear his ambivalent feelings about Ewing, mixing gratitude with a determination to make his way in life while taking charity from no one else. The Army, which offered an education without cost and advancement based solely on personal merit, made West Point an obvious goal for the young Sherman. While there's documentary evidence to support Marszalek's thesis about the psychological roots of Sherman's need for independence, the author is less convincing when he speculates that almost every personal and military act by Sherman—from his frequently absenting himself from his marriage to Ellen Ewing, his foster father's daughter, to his decision to fight for the Union despite his having lived in, and loved, the South—arose from his passion for stability. Much of Sherman's life can be explained simply by the fact that the general loved, and excelled in, the Army from the beginning, and revered the Union. Sherman was a born soldier, and during his brief periods as a civilian he seemed restless and dissatisfied. Finally, Marszalek argues persuasively that Sherman's scorched-earth tactics arose from his experience fighting the Seminoles in Florida, where he witnessed for the first time a war not between armies but between societies. Despite his sometimes heavy-handed psychobiographical theme, Marszalek succeeds in making this gruff, complex warrior come alive.
Pub Date: Nov. 30, 1992
ISBN: 0-02-920135-7
Page Count: 500
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1992
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
© 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.
