A readable, welcome contribution in this bicentennial of the Corps of Discovery’s transcontinental journey.
A well-considered life of Capt. William Clark, reluctant hero of the early frontier.
Retired journalist and People magazine editor Jones does a service in recounting the whole of Clark’s career, bracketed by wars and treaties with the Indian nations. In doing so, Jones misses or glosses over a few matters that have been exercising historians lately: Clark’s relationship with co-captain Meriwether Lewis, his status as a slaveholder and defender of slavery. As Jones notes, Clark rose to hero of exploration somewhat accidentally; though he had been a brave fighter in the wars against the Indians of the Old Northwest during and immediately after the Revolutionary War, it was his older brother George Rogers Clark who earned most of the glory. When Thomas Jefferson sought to enlist George on a military survey of the West, George suggested that William take his place—and, importantly, urged that the surveying party be small so as not to offend the Indians along the way; “ ‘three or four young Men’ could do the job at ‘a Trifling Expense’ over four or five years.” The party that Lewis and Clark led up the Missouri was ten times that size, but still small enough not to be confused for an invading army. As Jones notes, Clark was in the habit of keeping detailed journals even of mundane events, a habit that proved of particular usefulness during the journey. He was also not easily rattled, and a keen student of all that he saw, such that at the end of the overland journey, “Clark knew more about the Indian nations west of the Mississippi than any living American.” Following military service in the War of 1812, Clark put that knowledge to use as a negotiator, one who surely held a paternalistic view of the Indians but did not particularly want to rub them out; his signature, Jones notes, is on more treaties than that of any other American.
A readable, welcome contribution in this bicentennial of the Corps of Discovery’s transcontinental journey.Pub Date: May 24, 2004
ISBN: 0-8090-3041-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2004
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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