From a radiologist attached to both the Stanford Univ. School of Medicine and the Center for International Security and Arms Control—a provocative analysis of the constitutional problems presented by John Hinckley's March 30, 1981, attempt to assassinate Ronald Reagan. Abrams relates the story of Hinckley's drift into homicidal madness, underscoring how easily an apparently ordinary middle- class citizen like Hinckley can develop into a potential assassin. But what the author finds even more alarming is the confused and inadequate response of Reagan Administration officials to the shooting and to the requirements of the 25th Amendment regarding transfer of presidential power (e.g., Secretary of State Alexander Haig's erroneous announcement that he was to act as President)—and how, in their zeal to project the image of a strong President, these officials may have compounded Reagan's medical condition by having him accept visitors prematurely. Indeed, Abrams suggests that Reagan's aides, for purely political reasons, may have endangered the national security by failing to take advantage of the mechanisms offered by the 25th Amendment. For dealing with future similar crises, the author offers policy suggestions that take into account situations ranging from assassination attempts to the President's undergoing anesthesia during an operation. He suggests upgrading the role of the White House physician and seeking a more proper balance between physician-patient confidentiality, on one hand, and the national interest, on the other. An articulate and insightful examination of a problem with unlimited downside potential. (Photographs, drawings—not seen.)
Pub Date: Feb. 10, 1992
ISBN: 0-393-03042-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1991
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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