The ties that bind the two countries today are, at least in part, of Churchill’s making.
Crusty old Tories long complained that Winston Churchill wasn’t quite British. His official biographer shows that they were right.
Churchill’s mother, née Jennie Jerome, was born in Brooklyn in 1854. It thrilled Winston more to know that one of his ancestors was what he called, in the parlance of the time, “a Seneca squaw.” Writes Gilbert (The Righteous, 2003, etc.), “the quintessential Englishman was not only half American but also one-sixty-fourth Native American.” Being half American did not keep Churchill from serving as an advisor to the Spanish government just before war broke out with the U.S., nor did he shy from answering the call when it appeared that the U.S. and England were on the verge of war over some tangled dealings in Venezuela. Yet Churchill’s affinities were always with America, and the feelings were mutual; Churchill’s powers of persuasion were such that Charles Schwab, the head of U.S. Steel, gladly violated neutrality laws to build submarines for England during WWI, and even FDR figured out a way to skirt those same laws to supply Churchill with airplanes before the U.S. entered WWII. Close feelings apart, though, Churchill often found himself flummoxed by American politics: He was irritated when Congress pressed for quick repayment of war debts after WWI; unhappy when, in his view, the U.S. allowed Russia to swallow up half of Europe; and downright irate at Eisenhower’s obstinate refusal to hold informal talks with Soviet diplomats, which might have ended the Cold War much sooner. Much of this will be a revelation even to those who know Churchill’s work and career, and Gilbert does a fine job of charting the statesman’s sometimes mixed feelings for the land he considered a second home—and his closest ally.
The ties that bind the two countries today are, at least in part, of Churchill’s making.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-5992-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2005
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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