Appropriately big and vigorous life of the 26th President, by Miller (Stealing from America, p. 772; F.D.R., 1982, etc.). Despite his modern-day reputation as an imperialist and worse, Roosevelt emerges from Miller's pages—the first major one-volume life of TR since William Henry Harbaugh's Power and Responsibility (1961)—as a tremendously energetic reformer and moral beacon on the issues of his age. He took on corrupt politicians and bureaucrats throughout his career, and he instituted federal regulation of food and drug purity and of rapacious big business. Miller details the Roosevelt myth—TR's willful growth from puny scion to Rough Rider to ``big stick'' President—and finds it to be largely accurate, but the author concentrates less on the public man and more on his relations with close associates. Described by Lord Morley as ``a cross between St. Vitus and St. Paul,'' Roosevelt was perceived by his friend Henry Adams as having ``that singular primitive quality that belongs to ultimate matter—the quality that medieval theology assigned to God—he was pure act.'' Roosevelt's career rose meteorically from his election to the New York State Senate, and by age 24 he was the most famous politician in the state. Yet his personal life was marred by tragedy: His beloved first wife, Alice, died at 22 of a kidney disease; and his brother Elliot (father of Eleanor) died of an alcoholic seizure. Miller masters not only Roosevelt but fascinating ancillary facts as well—e.g., how TR's secretary of state, John Hay, while a young reporter, traced the origin of the Great Chicago Fire to Mrs. O'Leary's infamous cow. A sympathetic, detailed, tremendously readable account of the eventful life of our most energetic, irrepressible President. (Sixteen pages of b&w photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 11, 1992
ISBN: 0-688-06784-0
Page Count: 542
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1992
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
