An absorbing political and legal biography of a complicated and important figure of the 19th century. Niven (American History/Claremont Graduate School; Martin Van Buren and the Romantic Age of Politics, 1983, etc.) accomplishes for Salmon P. Chase previously what he did for Martin Van Buren, rescuing him from historical obscurity. Chase, a prominent politician and jurist, is today best remembered as Lincoln's secretary of the treasury, a post from which he secured funding to wage the Civil War and oversaw the creation of a new national banking system. Born in New Hampshire in 1808, he was shuttled off to relatives when financial crisis struck his family after the death of his father. Yet he still managed to attend Dartmouth. After studying law in Washington, D.C., with Attorney General William Wirt, he moved to Cincinnati, where he quickly became a leader in the antislavery movement. He defended so many runaway slaves that he earned himself the epithet ``the attorney general of fugitive slaves.'' Serving in the Senate and as governor of Ohio, he joined the new Republican Party and sought its nomination for president in 1860, losing to Lincoln. Instead, he accepted the treasury post. In 1864, Lincoln named him chief justice of the Supreme Court, in which capacity he is best known for presiding at the impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson, Lincoln's successor. Though Johnson wanted to dismantle Reconstruction and was a staunch political opponent of all Chase stood for, the justice reigned over the proceedings with stony decorum, ensuring a fair trial that led to Johnson's acquittal. Niven limns a complex portrait of a man he describes as a tragic and ultimately unfulfilled figure. Chase spent his life in public service but was egotistical and intensely ambitious. He was a man of lofty principles who nonetheless compromised them at important moments. With its thorough research and fine writing, this volume surpasses the high standard Niven set for himself in his biography of Van Buren.
Pub Date: March 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-19-504653-6
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
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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