A solid overview for general readers.
Prizewinning journalist and Fox News political analyst Williams (Muzzled: The Assault on Honest Debate, 2011, etc.) identifies more than two dozen individuals who helped shape modern America.
In brightly written chapters detailing the lives and actions of “great men and women who forged the nation we have today,” the author traces extraordinary changes of the 20th century that would have shocked the Founding Fathers, who lived in a smaller, far different society. Members of the new “founding family,” as he calls these modern change-makers, include jurists Earl Warren and Thurgood Marshall (racial equality), economist Milton Friedman (free markets), builders Robert Moses and William Levitt (the urban and suburban landscapes), George Meany (labor), Billy Graham (the Christian right), and Henry Kissinger (diplomacy). Some sparked social-change movements through books, such as Betty Friedan (The Feminine Mystique) and Rachel Carson (Silent Spring). Others are little known, like bureaucrat Robert Ball, a longtime Social Security official who redefined and expanded that program to define health care as a fundamental right; and Harry Hay, founder of the first U.S. gay rights group. In each instance, Williams draws on secondary sources to provide a balanced view of people and issues, often noting the “for better or worse” aspects of massive societal changes, such as the rise of the National Rifle Association under actor Charlton Heston. The author’s insistence on comparing modern change-makers to the Founding Fathers, however, is a bit of a stretch. While it allows him to make effective comparisons between American life past and present, it has the effect of elevating many individuals, such as Bill Bratton, father of data-driven policing, and Gen. William Westmoreland, who helped reshape the U.S. military, to company to which they do not belong. Perhaps most interesting is Jack and Ted Kennedy’s work on 1965 immigration reform, which has literally changed the face of America. Notably absent are technology and business figures.
A solid overview for general readers.Pub Date: April 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-307-95204-2
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
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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