Fascinating scholarship from Zeitz, who knows how to present history to an audience of nonspecialists.
Zeitz (Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern, 2006, etc.) approaches the already overloaded realm of Abraham Lincoln studies from a fresh direction.
John Nicolay (1832–1901) and John Hay (1838–1905) were young, intelligent, ambitious men who became acquainted with Lincoln during his pre-presidential years in Springfield, Ill. When Lincoln shifted from obscure Illinois lawyer-legislator to the presidency within a four-year span, Nicolay and Hay became the key members of his staff, controlling access to him in the White House, drafting policy memos, traveling with him around the nation and attending to many of his personal needs. During the Civil War, Nicolay and Hay knew more about Lincoln's thoughts and actions than anybody else. After the assassination, they had to figure out what to reveal about the president they considered a great patriot and in what form to do the revealing. Both experienced distinguished careers inside and outside government, married happily and raised families, but they knew implicitly that they would have to face up to the task of extending the Lincoln legacy. The result: two decades of extensive research with unparalleled access to Lincoln's personal and presidential papers, culminating in a 10-volume, admiring biography. Zeitz does a masterful job delineating the lives of Nicolay and Hay, explaining their roles in political contests, narrating their interactions with Lincoln and placing the Nicolay-Hay biography within the larger context of Lincoln studies. The author is mostly admiring of Nicolay and Hay, while simultaneously factoring in their biases in the service of American history. Readers will quite likely realize the vital role of the massive biography in understanding the seemingly simple man who became a complicated national touchstone.
Fascinating scholarship from Zeitz, who knows how to present history to an audience of nonspecialists.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-670-02566-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 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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