Following his earlier Thomas Jefferson: A Strange Case of Mistaken Identity (1989—not reviewed), Old Dominion professor Mapp offers a graceful, admiring assessment of the great democrat as President and as the aged but still intellectually vital ``Sage of Monticello.'' As President, Jefferson eased people's fears about the radical tendencies of his Democratic-Republican Party by ``taking things by the smooth handle.'' Mapp takes sharp issue with such Jefferson critics as Henry Adams and Theodore Roosevelt, who depicted the Virginian as both a hypocrite who violated his ``strict constructionist'' principles while in office and as a pacifist who left the nation woefully unprepared for the War of 1812. Instead, Mapp sees Jefferson as an activist, visionary chief executive who used his authority to order military action against the Barbary pirates, advance judicial reform, double the size of the nation through the Louisiana Purchase, and institute an embargo that kept peace with Great Britain while the US built up its navy. (Mapp does fault Jefferson for falling short of his libertarian ideals in condoning General James Wilkinson's trampling on civil liberties in New Orleans and in branding Aaron Burr as a traitor before his former Vice President came to trial.) Stepping down at the end of his second term in 1809, Jefferson battled debt, legal and family problems, and physical deterioration to shepherd the Univ. of Virginia from an innovative educational concept into actual physical existence—``one of the great triumphs of the human spirit,'' according to Mapp. An engrossing biography that pays full tribute to Jefferson's personal genius and political achievements. (B&w illustrations—not seen.)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-8191-8053-X
Page Count: 446
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1991
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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