Against many historians, Seigenthaler applauds Polk for achievements that he insists are “nothing short of remarkable,...
James K. Polk waged war against Mexico, and almost against Britain, to increase the size of the US by a full third. Yet, writes fellow Tennessean Seigenthaler, “somehow he is the least acknowledged among our presidents, which is somewhat mystifying.”
Perhaps not so mystifying, given that the Mexican-American War, widely known at the time as “Mr. Polk’s War,” was highly controversial, protested by the likes of Emerson, Thoreau, and a young Abe Lincoln. Even today, a certain amount of shame attaches to the American invasion of Mexico, which netted California, New Mexico, most of Arizona, and other territories, serving to lessen Polk’s reputation. Seigenthaler, founding editorial director of USA Today and veteran Tennessean journalist, allows that Polk, like his mentor Andrew Jackson—Polk’s career, he writes, “was grafted as a limb to the trunk of Jackson’s political tree”—was always spoiling for a fight. But, he argues, Polk worked from a sense of “moral certitude and self-righteousness” and probably believed, as did so many of his compatriots, that only American intervention could save Mexico from its innate barbarism. Interestingly, Seigenthaler adds, Polk seems to have been reading the mood of the nation correctly when he advocated annexation of the then-independent Republic of Texas in 1844, which the leading politicians, Democrat Martin Van Buren and Whig Henry Clay, refused to do. Swept into national office, Polk came to see states’ rights as secondary to the national interest, and he became a champion of American empire-building. His work in this regard won him admirers, but it also led him to “virtually incarcerate himself in the White House for the full tenure of his presidency” and to micro-manage his generals 2,000 miles distant, who disregarded his orders anyway. The stress of his presidency, the author suggests, condemned him to an early grave, and he died soon after leaving office.
Against many historians, Seigenthaler applauds Polk for achievements that he insists are “nothing short of remarkable, changing forever the geography and economy of the country.”Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2004
ISBN: 0-8050-6942-9
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2003
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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