The truth about American history’s most accomplished mythmaker turns out to be stranger than his many fictions.
A lively reconstruction of what really happened in William Cody’s life.
Cody was the most famous American of his day, and people around the world knew his story: He was a noble savage of the frontier, left to fend for himself at an early age, became the youngest Pony Express rider in history, fought Indians with wild abandon and, as he put it, “stood between savagery and civilization most all of my early days.” He also created the renowned Wild West Show, which spent three decades thrilling audiences with sketches of frontier derring-do that were as elaborately staged as any movie spectacular; his cast included many vanquished Indians whose names are celebrated today. As Warren (History/Univ. of California, Davis) painstakingly points out, there were many Buffalo Bills on the 19th-century frontier, and Cody seems to have borrowed from all of them; he may well have ridden for the Pony Express, for instance, but the adventures Cody reported in his unreliable memoir were unlikely in the extreme, such as convincing the famed Sioux warrior Rain-in-the-Face not to kill him. (The alleged encounter, Warren notes, took place in howling winter far from Sioux territory; the Sioux, sensibly, did not like to travel in such inclement weather, and a renowned leader would likely not have participated in such a mission had it ever existed.) Warren recalls Cody’s career as a young partisan in the Civil War to the details of his scandalous divorce from his long-suffering wife and his many failures as a businessman—but also many virtues as a human being, despite his habit of stretching the truth; the wonder of the entertainment empire he created; and even his role in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
The truth about American history’s most accomplished mythmaker turns out to be stranger than his many fictions.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2005
ISBN: 0-375-41216-6
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2005
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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