Indeed, there are plenty of books about Churchill, period. Shelden isn’t of the first rank, but the book holds up well...
Solid biography covering the first four decades of Winston Churchill’s life, marked by both ambition and heartbreak.
The heartbreak comes early and late in Shelden’s (English/Indiana State Univ.; Mark Twain: Man in White, 2010, etc.) account—early with rejection by a young woman for whom Churchill had conceived an unreturned love, late with rejection by his political colleagues at the height of World War I. The ambition is constant: When Churchill, having escaped from a Boer jail in part, one suspects, to impress his intended, gets shoved under the tram of love, he dusts himself off, makes a tidy sum writing his memoir, and wins elective office and ever-growing fame; when he suffers rejection by the elected and the electorate, he changes gears and parties and earns still more influence. Shelden opens with a longish episode that finds Churchill in the United States and Canada on a generally unsatisfying lecture tour about his adventures in the Boer War. He closes with a disgraced Churchill briefly exiting the political stage to fight in the trenches of France: “Like a Byronic figure in a novel that he might have written about his own political adventures, he was suddenly confronted with the possibility that he had reached the last chapter, and must now fight or die.” In between, Shelden offers an unadorned account of Churchill’s dogged pursuit to build his legacy against some long odds (including marked antipathy, it seems, on the part of his elders, family and foe alike). The author might, in fact, have offered more analysis in the place of plain narration, but there are plenty of other books on Churchill that do that.
Indeed, there are plenty of books about Churchill, period. Shelden isn’t of the first rank, but the book holds up well against the competition.Pub Date: March 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4516-0991-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2012
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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