A well-researched, thoughtful biography of a woman who “became entirely her own person, a rare feat for women of her day.”
Biography of the 19th-century socialite who made her way to or near “the center of more major events…than any woman and most men of her time.”
Born at a time in American history when females could neither vote nor hold office, Kate Chase Sprague (1840-1899) came to wield more political influence than any American woman ever had before. Her father and first political teacher was Salmon Chase. After he won the governorship of Ohio in 1855, Chase made his beautiful and accomplished daughter into his hostess and political confidante. When he accepted Lincoln’s appointment as treasury secretary on the eve of the Civil War in March 1861, Kate immediately established a social “court” in Washington that outshone that of Lincoln’s far-less-glamorous wife, Mary. Both father and daughter became known for the brilliance of their gatherings as well as the ruthlessness of their communal desire to eventually occupy the White House. In an effort to secure the money they needed to fund their political dream, Kate married the wealthy but erratic Rhode Island businessman-turned-politician William Sprague. While her staunchly anti-slavery father eventually broke with the Republican Party he helped found and made an unsuccessful run for the presidency as a Democrat, Kate’s marriage to Sprague foundered. She became the mistress of the charismatic, and married, New York state senator and Republican Party boss Roscoe Conkling. Their scandalous affair shared the headlines with other major events of the day, including the assassination of President James Garfield in 1881. Divorce the following year “dethroned” Kate from her unofficial status as American political “Queen” and made her a social outcast who would die in poverty at the age of 58. Oller’s work is less the story of a woman’s political rise and fall and more one that reveals how the social limitations of the past created tragic outcomes for talented females.
A well-researched, thoughtful biography of a woman who “became entirely her own person, a rare feat for women of her day.”Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-306-82280-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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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