Gossipy and judgmental thumbnail sketches of First Ladiesnot every one, but enough of them to wear the topic out entirely. Presidential daughter, biographer, and novelist Truman (Murder on the Potomac, 1994, etc.) is unabashedly opinionated about this famous job, which, one senses from this book, ought to be: Protect your man from the big, bad world; comfort him when you cannot; and don't cost him any votes. The women themselves come second. As Truman says, ``While I am heartily in favor of women achieving maximum opportunities and power, I doubt that the First Lady is the ideal symbolic vehicle for this ascent.'' Not surprisingly, Nancy Reagan, who exemplifies the sort of loving ``protector'' Truman admires, comes in for gentler handling than does Eleanor Roosevelt, whose accomplishments, we are told, are to be weighed against her ``tragic limitations'' as a wife. Although Truman can be effusive in her praise (she calls Lady Bird Johnson the ``almost perfect First Lady''), she's not one to miss a good opportunity for sniping at her subjects, as when she serves up examples of Jacqueline Kennedy's ``visceral repugnance for average Americans.'' One might almost take Truman for anti- elitist, did she not also say of Dolley Madison, the daughter of an unsuccessful businessman and a boardinghouse keeper, that ``there is nothing in her past to account for her combination of good taste and impeccable hospitality.'' Still, inclined to find something good in each of these women, Truman might have been stumped to find a real loser had not her father, Harry S Truman, judged Warren Harding the worst president. And so Florence Harding turns out to be a ``mean-spirited'' woman with a ``dÇclassÇ style, whining voice, and overbearing manner.'' Well-known lives revisited from a perspective that is more convincingly insider than insightful. (b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-43439-9
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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