Though Hudson’s choice of cases prefigures his conclusions, his evidence is incisive enough to challenge, if not disarm, the...
Does the killing of kings and religious leaders do anyone any good? British historian Hudson (War and the Media, not reviewed) looks at 18 famous cases and finds that only one might have accomplished the killer’s goals.
Some might object when Hudson adds Jesus Christ onto a list that includes Julius Caesar, Malcolm X, Thomas à Becket, Marat, and Rasputin. Others might ask why Abraham Lincoln is the only US president among the murdered elected leaders (like Gandhi, Yitzhak Rabin, and South Africa’s Hendrick Verwoerd) who, Hudson feels, might have changed their nations for the better had they died of natural causes. And why consider luckless victims like Archduke Franz Ferdinand (whose killing started WWI) and Lord Frederick Cavendish (knocked off by the IRA), who, like so many modern terrorist targets, were killed because they happened to be easy prey? It seems that in studying the phenomenology of assassination, Hudson is after bigger game. In his clear, accessibly argued monograph, he builds on the ideas of American sociologist Alfred Hirschman, who wrote off assassinations as a fool’s errand that can bring on only one of three outcomes: a backlash that reverses what the killers may have hoped to accomplish (Christ, Caesar, Lincoln), unforeseen calamities that make things worse for everyone (Archduke Ferdinand, Czar Nicholas II, Michael Collins), or a failure to alter whatever social conditions inspired the killing (Rasputin, Marat, Rabin). Hudson finds only one exception: Stalin’s killing of Leon Trotsky, which he believes reinforced Stalin’s reputation as a ruthlessly powerful global dictator. Lurking behind Hudson’s study is the big question of the extent to which individuals influence the fate of nations. His carefully qualified answer: not much.
Though Hudson’s choice of cases prefigures his conclusions, his evidence is incisive enough to challenge, if not disarm, the ill-informed hatemongering of those who advocate the killing of public leaders. (30 b&w illustrations, not seen)Pub Date: July 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-7509-1966-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2000
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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