Undertaken during his last two years, after being told he had lung cancer, Alsop's richly human, compelling pages were smoothed over and completed by colleague Platt. Alsop (1910-89) was a Washington journalist of great wit, knowledge, and humanity. Raised on his father's 700-acre farm on the Connecticut Gold Coast, he recalls elegiacally his schooling as an ``educated gentleman'' at Groton and Harvard and his youth among the Long Island North Shore's ``WASP Ascendancy,'' the fabulously rich who produced many of the nation's leaders, especially the two Roosevelt Presidents to whom Alsop was related. This tribe, with its high-flown diction and vast dress codes, also produced the ``Wise Men'' who helped guide FDR through the New Deal and WW II. As a fresh young reporter in the New York Herald Tribune's Washington, D.C., bureau, Alsop found himself leading a double life as a working reporter with a Senate beat and as a nightly diner-out among the elite, with dinner every second month with cousin Eleanor and the President at the White House. He switched to writing a column in tandem with a second reporter and eventually with his brother Stewart. In Hong Kong during WW II, Alsop went to an opium den with The New Yorker's Emily Hahn (then pregnant), then joined Colonel Claire Chennault's American Volunteer Group of ``Flying Tigers'' and later became a minor actor in the recall of General Joseph Stilwell. Alsop gives us firsthand views of George Kennan, Joseph McCarthy, Charles de Gaulle, Dean Acheson, Winston Churchill, and Robert Oppenheimer, among others. His friendship with JFK becomes exhilarating. But the Vietnam War collapses his gusto, and when he retires from journalism in 1974, it is because ``I could no longer understand what was happening in America, perhaps because I had finally become an old man, frozen in the viewpoints of the past.'' Top-flight—and then some. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: March 16, 1992
ISBN: 0-393-02917-4
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1992
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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