Phelps provides useful perspective on 18th-century mores that made spies like Hale initially reviled by both sides, but his...
A new look at the Connecticut preacher’s son who became an icon of patriotic sacrifice.
True-crime specialist Phelps (I’ll Be Watching You, 2008, etc.) delves deeply into the comportment and character of Nathan Hale (1755–76). Covering his studies at Yale and his fulfilling early career as a schoolmaster in the bustling port town of New London, the author shows an amiable, intelligent, athletic and well-educated young gentleman. Hale’s dedication to his Christian faith was soon to be matched by his passion for the cause of his “injured, bleeding country” in the throes of rebellion against its colonial masters. But he also had moments of boredom and self-questioning, relieved by any number of romantic dalliances or an occasional bout of serious boozing with former Yale classmates and other friends. He was swept into military service first in the militia, then became an officer in George Washington’s army, with which he participated in the siege of Boston in 1775. After Washington’s forces withdrew from New York City and the English occupied it, Hale volunteered for a mission behind enemy lines on Long Island to gather information on the British high command’s resources and possible strategies. The rest is history, and Phelps makes no real inroads on the major questions: Why was Hale so easily tricked into revealing his mission to Robert Rogers, a well-known British military man? Where exactly in New York was he hung from a tree after uttering those famous sentiments about having “only one life” to give? (Sentiments that were probably paraphrased for posterity.) Where was his body buried in an unmarked grave? Could Hale have actually started the fire that devastated lower New York? All mysteries still.
Phelps provides useful perspective on 18th-century mores that made spies like Hale initially reviled by both sides, but his narrative could use more depth.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-37641-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2008
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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