A splendid, short-form introduction to Grant’s life and career.
Ulysses S. Grant was renowned as a hero and savior of the Union in his day. Yet modern historians are likely to recall him as a president who barely survived one scandal after another.
Call it a profile in courage: in this contribution to Arthur Schlesinger’s American Presidents series (and the best written of the 32 volumes to have appeared thus far), novelist and historian Bunting (All Loves Excelling, 2001, etc.) attempts to rescue Grant from “the clichés of the Grant Myth” by examining their origins. Unlike many politicians and commanders of his era, Grant was inclined to a commonsensical, economical attitude that was easily mistaken for taciturnity and opacity; his fellow students at West Point, for example, remembered him a silent and awkward, though one praised him as having “the most perfect regard for truth . . . not a prominent man in the Corps, but respected by all.” No one back home expected him to survive the Military Academy, much less to become a hero of the Mexican War, a conflict he regarded from the outset as unjust but served in nonetheless, writing to a friend, “Experience proves that the man who obstructs a war in which his country is engaged, no matter whether right or wrong, occupies no enviable place in life or history.” Not that Grant was particularly ambitious to earn glory in life or history; rather, he seems to have thrived in doing his duty quietly and efficiently, moving, like Caesar, to the next task when one was finished. Such qualities endeared him to Abraham Lincoln, whose champion he became; indeed, writes Bunting, as president, “Grant would labor to fulfill what he took to be Abraham Lincoln’s vision for a nation made whole.” And what of his failure to stem corruption in his government? Bunting explains, quite reasonably, that Grant accepted some of it as political necessity—and argues as well that some of what we regard as corruption today was not judged as such in Grant’s own time, adding that “the best-known scandal of the Grant era had nothing to do with Ulysses Grant.”
A splendid, short-form introduction to Grant’s life and career.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2004
ISBN: 0-8050-6949-6
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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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