Overlong, but still the best life of Hay that we have and a persuasive argument for taking another look at the life of a...
An overstuffed biography of an overlooked American statesman and reluctant politician.
If you’re a political scientist, American historian or fan of 19th-century Republicanism, you have likely heard of John Hay (1838–1905). If you’re a tourist in Washington, you likely have passed by the Hay-Adams Hotel, across the street from St. John’s Church, where presidents go to pray. Former Newsweek editor Taliaferro (In a Far Country: The True Story of a Mission, a Marriage, and the Remarkable Reindeer Rescue of 1898, 2006, etc.) finds in Hay a subject worthy of wider circulation. Hay, from the minor aristocracy of small-town Illinois, began his professional career as a secretary to Abraham Lincoln, close enough to the action that he traveled with the president to Gettysburg and there recorded that Lincoln “said his half dozen lines of consecration and the music wailed and we went home.” By association with his friend Robert Lincoln, the president’s son, Hay came to be one of the fallen leader’s first biographers—but also a servant of Republican presidents thereafter, one who long “had sworn that he never would run for office, but even in his adamance, he gave hints that he was wavering.” Hay’s apogee came with service as secretary of state to Theodore Roosevelt, who signed up Hay for a second term without even consulting him—but he served till the end of his life, saying, “it would be a scandal to contradict him.” Taliaferro inclines toward too much completeness. The story of how the Panama Canal came to be is an intriguing one and worthy of a book itself, though here, its political complexities tend to burden an otherwise quickly flowing narrative, which moves even faster when friends of Hay, such as Mark Twain and Henry Adams, are part of it.
Overlong, but still the best life of Hay that we have and a persuasive argument for taking another look at the life of a career public servant.Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-1416597308
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
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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