informed by an entertaining historian. (Book-of-the-Month Club/History Book Club selection)
Fleet narrative and clear-eyed psychology put our 28th president’s flawed administration (1913–21) into personal and global
perspective. A veteran man of letters, Auchincloss (Collected Stories, 1994, etc.) discriminates between two Woodrow Wilsons (1856–1924): the cherished father, husband, and friend is trumped by the Presbyterian scion flexing a divine mandate to implement the people’s will according to his own. Wives Ellen Axson (died 1914) and Edith Galt (married 1915) kept Wilson’s favor by making adulation of him their life’s work, whereas faithful secretary Joseph Tumulty and “second personality” Edward House fell from grace, Auchincloss contends, as a consequence of Wilson’s conviction that disagreement equaled personal hostility. Perhaps such an attitude should not be too surprising in a man who once declared, “Remember that God ordained that I should be the next president.” Auchincloss analyzes brave accomplishments: quashing boss rule, “New Freedom” from monopolies, establishing child-labor laws, erecting the Federal Reserve system, and, alas, establishing an income tax. But again and again Wilson’s all-or-nothing dualism rendered compromise impossible—until compromise became unavoidable and he had to capitulate wholesale. Auchincloss is a fair-minded critic, but even he sees Wilson misjudging the Great War’s threat: campaigning for a second term in1916, Wilson proclaimed America “too proud to fight” in a “mechanical slaughter”—but by 1917 he had to declare war regardless. Auchincloss also deplores Wilson’s insistence on attaching his utopian League of Nations scheme to a punitive Treaty of Versailles that he must have known no Republican Congress would ratify. Indeed, the national tour to win public backing for the treaty induced the stroke that clipped Wilson’s career. One still blinks at the bizarre aftermath dramatized here: only a cursory inquiry was made by Congress into the sick man’s fitness to govern, and for months Wilson’s wife was his sole link to all government emissaries. No wonder his last word was “Edith.” Its keen characters shrewdly quoted, this taut, fair presentation leaves the reader entertained by an informed storyteller, and
informed by an entertaining historian. (Book-of-the-Month Club/History Book Club selection)Pub Date: April 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-670-88904-0
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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