A readable, evenhanded work that would be appropriate for younger readers as well.
A sympathetic look at the Union general with an eye toward correcting inaccuracies in the record.
The late historian Eisenhower (Soldiers and Statesmen: Reflection on Leadership, 2012, etc.), son of the president and a general and West Point graduate in his own right, does a service in presenting this solid, useful biography of William Tecumseh Sherman (1820-1891), the great general and comrade of Ulysses S. Grant. In his unadorned prose, Eisenhower conveys the stalwart, no-nonsense nature of this dedicated soldier who engineered the modern concept of “total war” and, like Grant, was not afraid to fight. Born in Lancaster, Ohio, Sherman was sent to live with a foster family, the Ewings, when his prominent father died. He stayed loyal to the first woman he loved, daughter Ellen Ewing, and later married her. Like fellow Ohioan and West Point graduate Grant, Sherman floundered during peacetime, resisting his in-laws’ pressure to take up family employment. He was dismayed at the disintegration of the Union and believed presciently that the Civil War would be won in the West, specifically in terms of who controlled the Mississippi. Under Gen. Winfield Scott, Sherman’s brigade at the battle of Bull Run suffered high casualties, and he expected to be “cashiered.” Instead, he was promoted and vindicated himself at Shiloh, despite his periodic depression that rendered him temporarily “unbalanced.” Under Grant, Sherman found his “niche,” and Eisenhower depicts their warm friendship as they protected each other through the key battles of Vicksburg, Chattanooga, Kennesaw Mountain and Atlanta. Grant gave Sherman total credit for the revolutionary concept of a “march to the sea.” The author tempers criticism of Sherman’s supposed ruthlessness with accounts of his fairness toward civilians and his saving of Savannah.
A readable, evenhanded work that would be appropriate for younger readers as well.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-451-47135-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: NAL/Berkley
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
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
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
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