A fresh perspective on Colonial America.
A sympathetic look at George Washington’s mother.
Saxton (Emerita, History and Women’s Studies/Amherst Coll.; Being Good: Women’s Moral Values in Early America, 2002, etc.) believes that Washington’s biographers have treated Mary Ball Washington (1708-1789) unfairly. “The caricature of an incompetent, crude, imperious, selfish, and unloving woman flowered fully in the 1940s and ’50s,” Saxton writes, a portrait based on scant evidence and shaped by sentimental maternal stereotypes. Steeped in Colonial history, the author takes on a formidable project: to uncover the shards of Mary’s life, place her in the context of her times, and tease apart “the biographical fates of mother and son” in order to give Mary “the dignity of her independent existence.” Saxton offers a sensitive, sharply drawn portrait of a resourceful woman whose early losses made her anxious and fearful for life. By the time she was an adolescent, her father, stepfather, half brother, and mother all had died. After 11 years of marriage, she became a widowed mother of five, facing financial instability. “Trauma,” Saxton observes, “was Mary’s normality.” As an old woman, one evening, during a thunderstorm, her daughter found her praying alone: “my trust is in God,” Mary confessed, “but sometimes my fears are stronger than my faith.” Her fears led her to be overprotective of her children, not least her eldest son, George. When he was 14, Mary strongly opposed his desire to join the British navy as a midshipman—“a singularly dangerous institution,” Saxton notes. Mary prevailed but later found herself repeatedly at odds with her son’s “aggressive, restless, and risk-taking spirit” as well as his vanity and stinginess. Besides closely examining Mary’s relationships with various members of her extended family, Saxton mostly succeeds in the challenge of treating fairly Mary’s role as a demanding, often cruel, slaveholder who tried to project strength and authority through “force, name-calling, and abuse.” Her religious beliefs validated that treatment: “violence,” Mary thought, “could justifiably produce obedience,” and obedience led to moral behavior. Like others of her time and class, slavery shaped her identity.
A fresh perspective on Colonial America.Pub Date: June 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8090-9701-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
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
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
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