An inspired, engaging comparative portrait.
An organic comparison of two highly flawed and deeply sympathetic characters at the helm of England at her most perilous hour.
Historian Weisbrode (On Ambivalence: The Problems and Pleasures of Having it Both Ways, 2012, etc.) navigates among the infinite accounts already existing on Churchill and the House of Windsor for a touching dual portrait of two historical characters whose greatness largely relied on the support of the other. The recent film The King’s Speech brought out the painfully human shortcomings of King George VI, “Bertie,” who always expected his big brother to become king and certainly wasn’t educated for the role. Churchill, although remembered as the country’s savior during World War II, had spent many years previously in the political wilderness. Both men had endured terrible school years and a deep-seated anxiety of influence vis-à-vis their fathers. Both had to step up patriotically to fill the vacuum created by political crisis: Edward VIII’s abdication dropped the royal hot potato in his younger brother’s lap, and Churchill was the only one capable of running the government after the disgrace of Neville Chamberlain. Although Churchill (not then in power) had urged Edward not to abdicate, it is hard to imagine how the prime minister would have minded such a king “with appeasement in the air and his integrity thrown into question.” Churchill and Bertie met for weekly luncheons during the war, with or without the queen; both men used language very deliberately; both had few intimates around them (“they were essentially friendless,” writes the author) but relied on the asymmetry of their relationship and the urgency of official duty to build “an armature of knowledge and trust.” Weisbrode makes a very compelling case that each man was “working against his own faults, on behalf of the other.”
An inspired, engaging comparative portrait.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-670-02576-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
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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