A brisk and entertaining historical narrative.
American politics revealed through the lives of two indelible figures.
Documentary film producer and writer Zwonitzer (co-author: Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone?: The Carter Family and Their Legacy in American Music, 2002) plies his considerable talent at storytelling in this vivid dual biography of statesman John Hay (1838-1905) and 19th-century America’s most famous writer, Mark Twain (1835-1910). The author’s choice of these two men seems somewhat arbitrary: although both grew up in “remote and brutish Mississippi River towns,” their relationship “was not one of great intimacy and was even a tad distant.” After they met in the 1860s, they rarely saw one another. Temperamentally, Zwonitzer notes, they were “very different sorts of men.” Hay was refined and diplomatic and had married into significant wealth. Twain, volatile and impetuous, was dogged by debt. They differed politically, too: Hay, who had been Lincoln’s secretary, was “a Republican in the original party sense: a defender of government by educated and accomplished white men”; Twain “was a small-d-democrat and skeptical that anybody in power would long remain interested in the common good.” From 1895 to 1905, Hay was involved most directly in the country’s transformation as ambassador to England and secretary of state under William McKinley and, after McKinley’s assassination, Theodore Roosevelt. In 1898, America engaged in war with Spain over Cuba; Spain capitulated after a few weeks, ceding the Philippines to the U.S. The annexation of Hawaii soon followed. Hay’s negotiations with British and European leaders put him in the center of world affairs. But “Hay needed no office in order to wield influence,” his friend Henry Adams commented. “For him, influence lay about the streets, waiting for him to stoop to it.” Because Twain’s waning years are well-known—tireless efforts to earn money, sadness over the deaths of two daughters and his wife—Hay emerges as the fresher figure in Zwonitzer’s pages.
A brisk and entertaining historical narrative.Pub Date: April 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-56512-989-4
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
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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