A memorable lesson in how journalists can dig out the truths beneath official lies.
A micro-history of a White House coverup, a journalist's reputation defiled and the eventual emergence of the truth.
NPR reporter Algeo (Harry Truman’s Excellent Adventure: The True Story of a Great American Road Trip, 2009, etc.) examines a slice of American history from 1893, when President Grover Cleveland disappeared from public view for about a week around the Independence Day holiday. With the nation suffering an economic depression, Cleveland and his advisors did not want to heighten the panic with the truth: The president had been diagnosed with cancer of the mouth. The president arranged for the tumor to be surgically removed by a team of physicians aboard the yacht of a friend. Cleveland's wife Frances and his press aide lied to journalists and anybody else who asked about what was occurring on the yacht. Journalists accepted the lies, and the general public believed Cleveland had undergone nothing more than uncomfortable dental work. The truth did not begin to emerge until late August, after accomplished journalist E.J. Edwards broke the story in a Philadelphia newspaper. Despite Edwards' longtime reputation as a fair and accurate reporter, other journalists, government officials and general readers believed he had concocted the account. Edwards would not receive total vindication until 1917, when one of the surgeons who assisted in the operation on the yacht published an account in the Saturday Evening Post. Algeo is a determined researcher and fine stylist, and the story of presidential illness serves as an effective connecting thread through a somewhat broader account of the United States during the hard economic times of the 1890s.
A memorable lesson in how journalists can dig out the truths beneath official lies.Pub Date: May 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-56976-350-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2011
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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