Intimate, spellbinding drama of the affinity between friends, each struggling in his own way to tell the country the truth...
Journalist and historian Perry (Lift Up Thy Voice, 2001, etc.) examines in remarkable detail the 15-month period during which two iconic American figures produced monumental American literature.
Ulysses S. Grant (1822–85) had the greater struggle. Left holding the bag in 1884 after his Wall Street partner absconded, the two-term president and the country’s greatest general was flat broke, with a cancerous growth fatally rooted at the back of his mouth. Mark Twain (1835–1910), younger by a dozen years, had evolved over the previous decade from an unabashed fan into a close friend and confidant of Grant’s. The two initially had little more in common than an upbringing in the West (Twain actually served a few weeks in a Confederate unit before abandoning the Civil War entirely), but both loved to tell stories while smoking cigars. Not privy at first to the seriousness of Grant’s illness, Twain proposed that the general write his memoirs as a favor to the nation and a way to make money for both of them; Perry avers that Twain hoped to secure the publishing rights as a largesse for the company he owned, fronted by his niece’s husband. The proud and modest Grant had no income and dismissed any attempts at financial aid, no matter how well disguised, even from fellow officers who had stayed close. He had resisted writing his memoirs, the author states, for fear that a poor reception would further embarrass his family. After winning him over, Twain took up an unfinished novel he had put down years before without a clue to an ending; now he finally got his scapegrace hero and runaway slave off the river to complete The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Intimate, spellbinding drama of the affinity between friends, each struggling in his own way to tell the country the truth about itself.Pub Date: May 11, 2004
ISBN: 0-679-64273-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2004
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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