A compilation of mostly captivating thoughts on the American way, as expressed in articles, book reviews, etc., by Yale history professor Blum (Years of Discord, 1991, etc.). The material here focuses on people (FDR, Woodrow Wilson, Henry Wallace, Archibald MacLeish) as well as concepts (``Politics of the Warren Court,'' ``The Red Scare of 1919-1920''). Blum begins with observations on the old (political) and new (social) approaches to history, then goes on to write the kind of history that generally encompasses both, marked by an unwavering perspective that's both clear-minded and humane. The essay ``Burden of American Equality,'' for instance, pungent with the quality of Jacksonian America, contends that slavery bound southern whites together in a way that was totally different from the stratified competition of the North. In ``Virtuous Texts,'' the author approaches the development of Theodore Roosevelt's thought via the Bostonian children's literature of the time—literature that offered an apotheosis of the outdoors-oriented New England world of denial and hard work, with character as the key to success. ``Power and Order'' then looks at what this childhood reading—plus old money, father-worship, a weak mother, and the early death of a beloved wife—made of the man. By comparison, pieces on Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt are rushed and thin, depending too much on the reader's recall of the period, with assertion and conclusion outweighing evidence and development. A tasty historical potpourri, prepared with style.
Pub Date: Oct. 25, 1993
ISBN: 0-393-03548-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1993
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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