Cast slightly in the shadow by the recent works of better-known biographers (Edmund Morris’s Theodore Rex and Louis...
The renowned, larger-than-life politician comes in for respectful but critical treatment at the hands of debut biographer Dalton (History/Phillips Academy, Andover).
Theodore Roosevelt wasn’t exactly a self-made man—he came from wealth and what passed for aristocracy in mid-19th-century New York—but he did labor endlessly to improve in every conceivable way not only himself but also the record he would leave to history. One result of those efforts, Dalton observes, was his steady emergence as a cultural icon; he won hands-down, for instance, a contemporary magazine’s poll of its readers to determine who was “the greatest man in the United States.” Another result was a tangled, partial historical record through which his biographer bravely carves a path, tossing aside the merely worshipful on one hand and the merely damning on the other. Sorting fact from myth, she delivers a portrait that questions some of Roosevelt’s stands (his glorification of war and early lack of interest in women’s rights) even as it yields an admiring assessment of his accomplishments. The author turns up material that has not been widely discussed outside professional historical literature, including Roosevelt’s dispatches from Cuba during the Spanish-American War, in which he called his commanding general an “unwieldy swine” and railed that “the President [McKinley] & Secretary [of War] are causing dreadful loss of life.” Interestingly, she also charts Roosevelt’s evolution from callow racist to human-rights champion, and from a privileged caricature out of the Gilded Age to a trust-busting crusader who urged that the US would remain forever backward unless it equalized wealth and curbed the power of corporations. These transitions make him very much a man for our time, one whom aspiring politicians would do well to study.
Cast slightly in the shadow by the recent works of better-known biographers (Edmund Morris’s Theodore Rex and Louis Auchincloss’s Theodore Roosevelt, both 2001), this nonetheless ranks high among the available portraits of the rough-riding president.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2002
ISBN: 0-679-44663-X
Page Count: 736
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
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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