Quite lluminating, and at times even entertaining (as when Gould offers his take on the four presidents most representative...
Or, what a long, strange trip it’s been.
In this hefty companion—and at turns rejoinder—to Jules Witcover’s Party of the People (below), political historian Gould (American History/Univ. of Texas at Austin) writes that at its origins the GOP “consisted of disparate groups with different visions of what the party should be and where it ought to go.” Some early members favored an anti-immigrant, nativist stance; others, more liberal, pressed for a coherent antislavery platform. Whatever the case, most suspected that the majority Democrats and Whigs of the 1840s and ’50s were agents of “schemes of aristocracy the most revolting and oppressive with which the earth was ever cursed,” in the words of the Michigan party’s charter. Gaining national prominence with the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, the party was tested, following the Civil War, by episodes of ineptitude and corruption—to say nothing, writes Gould, of northern voters’ suspicion that something deeply radical underlay Republican efforts to “achieve suffrage for blacks in the South.” If soft on big business, Gould demonstrates, Republicanism from the late-19th to the mid-20th century was eminently moderate, and dominantly urban and suburban, fielding solidly middle-of-the-road candidates such as Wendell Wilkie and Nelson Rockefeller. (The latter, Gould writes, “was not a very good national politician,” in part because he “seemed to think that his money and celebrity appeal entitled him to leadership.”) Enter the rise of Cold War conservatism, led by the likes of a comparatively soft Richard Nixon and a comparatively hard Barry Goldwater, on whose heels came Ronald Reagan and his hard-right cohort. The subsequent realignment of the party essentially pushed out moderates; as Gould writes, come 1992, “the trouble with [GOP presidential aspirant Pat] Buchanan was not that he rejected core Republican values but that he articulated them with damaging clarity.” Whence the current leadership, at turns antifederalist and imperialist, isolationist and unilateralist—all characteristics of a GOP past, present, and presumably future.
Quite lluminating, and at times even entertaining (as when Gould offers his take on the four presidents most representative of the GOP’s core). Just the thing for the 2004 election.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-50741-8
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.
A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
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