An insightful look at a complex relationship that has been largely lost to history.
The portrait of a once-famous, now nearly forgotten figure in 20th-century American politics.
Louis Howe (1871–1936) met Franklin Roosevelt in 1911, when Howe was a newspaper reporter and FDR a freshly minted New York state senator. They became fast friends, and Howe proved to be a pivotal figure in Roosevelt’s life and career. Early on he saw FDR’s enormous potential as a leader, and Roosevelt valued his frank and clear-eyed advice. American Heritage contributor Fenster (The Spirit of Invention: The Story of the Thinkers, Creators, and Dreamers Who Formed Our Nation, 2009, etc.) shows how the friendship grew in importance to both men as the years progressed, especially when FDR hit his lowest point in the 1920s. Roosevelt ran as the Democratic vice-presidential nominee in 1920 and lost; the next year, a mysterious illness (later diagnosed as polio) rendered him paralyzed from the waist down. While many considered this a career-ender, including FDR’s mother, Howe refused to give up. He devoted himself to keeping Roosevelt’s political hopes alive by meeting with potential supporters, writing editorials and attending countless meetings and conventions on FDR’s behalf as he recovered over the next two years. Howe’s devotion, Fenster effectively argues, lessened the burden on Roosevelt and helped give him the will to recover and eventually ascend to the presidency. Eleanor, too, grew close to Howe, and he gave her early advice on speechmaking and handling the press that proved invaluable; she later gained a reputation as a confident and dynamic public speaker. Plagued by lifelong poor health, Howe died of respiratory illness in 1936 during FDR’s first term. Never a man given to expressing his emotions, the president was visibly moved at Howe’s funeral, letting out a gasp and struggling to keep his composure as the casket was lowered into the ground.
An insightful look at a complex relationship that has been largely lost to history.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-230-60910-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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