A new study that defends the South’s greatest icon against the negative assessment promulgated by such revisionist biographies as Thomas Connelly’s The Marble Man (1977). Taylor (William Henry Seward, 1991, etc.) depicts Robert E. Lee as a quiet, dignified, courteous figure. The son of George Washington’s general “Light Horse Harry” Lee, he performed brilliantly as a young West Point—trained officer in the Mexican War. He learned under General Winfield Scott that a well-led small force could defeat a larger foe, that planning, reconnaissance, audacity, seizing the initiative, and acting decisively were vitally important. Lee deplored slavery and said he had no respect for those who would destroy the Union, yet he sided with the secessionists as a loyal citizen of Virginia. He was a man of contradictions: modest, thoughtful, and realistic in many ways, yet dangerously romantic about the “glory” of dying in battle. Lee was criticized for achieving victories at very high cost and continuing a hopeless struggle largely to vindicate his own honor at the expense of thousands of lives. Taylor blames Lee’s subordinates for not following his often vague orders. The South suffered decisive defeats at Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and New Orleans at the hands of more powerful Federal forces. Lee appears to have lost control of the battle of Gettysburg, where Taylor finds the general over-confident after Confederate success on the first day, making decisions that resulted in the loss of one-third of his army. Lincoln’s reelection in 1864 signaled the end of the rebellion, although Lee’s diehard fight continued the carnage in service to the Lost Cause as his army melted away from casualties and desertions. Useful and easy reading, this evaluation of Lee as a gifted soldier and a Christian gentleman of character and humility does not provide many new insights nor convincingly refute the claims of Lee’s critics.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-57488-183-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1999
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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