It would roil Butler's immense ego to learn that—not 60 years after his death—this well-crafted study is even necessary.
A highly readable exhumation of the career of Nicholas Murray Butler, president of the Carnegie Endowment and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and almost entirely forgotten today.
Once upon a time in America, the opinions and prescriptions of college presidents seriously mattered. To the list of Harvard's Eliot, Princeton's Wilson and Chicago's Hutchins, add Columbia's Butler, who over the course of four decades transformed a provincial college in Morningside Heights into a world-class university. Rosenthal (English/Columbia Univ.) admirably chronicles this achievement, while at the same time exposing Butler's thinly veiled anti-Semitism, his overblown reputation as a fundraiser and his autocratic governance, which stifled all student dissent and drove off not a few fine faculty members. Hugely ambitious, hen-pecked and emotionally guarded, Butler appears truly to have loved only his daughter more than himself and the school he came to embody. From Columbia's bully pulpit and through an admixture of relentless self-promotion, friendships with great men (Carnegie, Teddy Roosevelt) and some genuine political talent of his own, Butler emerged as the model of conventional wisdom among the Republican, WASP, internationalist establishment of the first half of the 20th century. A caricature of Samuel Johnson's clubbable man (Butler's honors, awards, memberships and associations were endless), he helped shape his party's direction and the country's agenda. Most notably, through his promotion of the Kellogg-Briand Pact, he nudged the world. When the applause subsided, however, almost all his exertions outside the kingdom of Columbia amounted to little. Rosenthal shines in demonstrating how the winner of so many of life's glittering prizes should end up, for the most part, an index entry in the biographies of greater men.
It would roil Butler's immense ego to learn that—not 60 years after his death—this well-crafted study is even necessary.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-374-29994-3
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2005
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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