A long-lost literary treasure with an absorbing tale of its own. In the course of a distinguished career, James (d. 1955)- -winner of two Pulitzers, for The Raven (1930) and Andrew Jackson (1938)—developed the lucrative sideline of producing corporate histories. Commissioned in 1944 to write the life story of William Russell Grace (founder of the multinational enterprise that still bears his name), James completed a manuscript that Viking was set to publish in 1948. For reasons still not entirely clear, the project was aborted and the galleys consigned to a warehouse. They were unearthed years later by Lawrence A. Clayton, a University of Alabama professor researching a scholarly history of W.R. Grace & Co. in Latin America. The finder arranged for the text's publication and here has contributed an informative introduction on the belated appearance of an altogether engrossing period piece. Drawing on unrestricted access to corporate archives and personal papers, James offers a detailed account of an immensely successful ÇmigrÇ. A son of Ireland's impoverished gentry, Grace (1832-1904) decided early on to make his way across the water. Having amassed a small fortune as a supplier to the sailing vessels that exported Peru's vast guano deposits, after the Civil War he moved his base of operations and family to Manhattan. There, Grace became even wealthier, building a mercantile empire whose far-flung interests ranged from railroads and rubber plantations through global shipping lines. He also found time for politics, bucking Tammany Hall to win election as the city's first Roman Catholic mayor. More merchant prince than robber baron, Grace earned considerable influence in the highest councils of the Democratic Party as an advocate of good government and reform. A lively chronicle, doubly welcome because it rescues from undeserved obscurity one of the Gilded Age's more consequential players—as well as a master annalist's handiwork.
Pub Date: Sept. 7, 1993
ISBN: 0-8420-2444-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1993
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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