A convincing brief for reconsidering this prescient, fearless public figure.
Wheelan (Invading Mexico: America’s Continental Dream and the Mexican War, 1846–1848, 2007, etc.) gently rehabilitates John Quincy Adams, who after one disastrous presidential term embarked on a long career as the conscience of Congress.
Eldest son of John and Abigail Adams, shapers of Revolutionary America, John Quincy (1767–1848) grew up under the aegis of Franklin and Jefferson, lived in Paris, attended Harvard and was appointed minister to the Netherlands at age 27 by President Washington. Yet he seemed to take pleasure in going against the grain; as his diplomatic career careened into politics, he continually alienated the parties that supported him. His rocky road to the presidency in 1824 was aided by a “corrupt bargain” struck with House Speaker Henry Clay, who threw his support to John Quincy in exchange for the post of Secretary of State. Andrew Jackson exacted his revenge in the election four years later, and Wheelan finally warms to his chilly subject once Adams lost his presidential job at age 61. Prone to depression, he took up writing poetry, until persuaded in 1831 to run for the House seat representing Plymouth, Mass. As the antislavery movement gained force in the 1830s, Congressman Adams introduced numerous petitions from citizens urging the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia. This became his cause célèbre when Congress, hogtied by the powerful Southern states, passed a gag rule that effectively restricted debate on slavery; Adams would fight for eight years to rescind it. He helped delay the annexation of Texas; represented the Amistad mutineers in the Supreme Court; and ensured that the endowment left by James Smithson would become the nation’s Smithsonian Institution. In later years, Adams became a living symbol, the last of the Enlightenment sages and an eloquent spokesman for those denied a voice in government: abolitionists, slaves, Indians and women.
A convincing brief for reconsidering this prescient, fearless public figure.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-78672-012-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2007
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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