An unconvincing, if energetic, plea for giving robber barons the benefit of realpolitik.
One historian’s nomination of England’s John of Gaunt (1340–99), Duke of Lancaster and father of King Henry IV, as both chivalry’s last great practitioner and direct progenitor of the likes of Donald Trump.
Cantor (Emeritus, History and Sociology/NYU; Antiquity, 2003, etc.) amply documents the Duke’s qualifications: in rough priority order, connected powerbroker, warrior, proto-capitalist, and heterosexual (unlike nephew King Richard II). Yet it seems to take an inordinate amount of backtracking and reemphasis to wedge Gaunt satisfactorily into the selected symbolic role. This is not biography, but rather a picky academic argument as to why Gaunt’s life can be said to bring the medieval period to its close. Annual rents alone, controlled by Gaunt’s immediate Plantagenet family, apart from sundry bribes, tributes, and ransoms extracted under force of arms, would have made him, Cantor estimates, a billionaire (in today’s money) five times over. He patronized John Wyclif in cultivating the seeds of Reformation a century before its time, then dumped him on the brink; he likewise sponsored Geoffrey Chaucer, a relative by marriage, to the point where his output also began to sound a little radical to peers of Gaunt’s mindset, then backed off. He also loyally abstained from a throne grab when it might well have been his. But when Cantor runs out of undocumented assertions that Gaunt was unusually considerate—that is, “chivalrous”—toward all his mistresses but “never used a condom” (animal-based products were in fact available) it sounds more than a little like historical press agentry. Cantor’s interesting defense of the African slave trade as hypothetically posed by its instigator, Prince Henry (the Navigator) of Portugal, who was Gaunt’s grandson by his second marriage, also has stretch marks.
An unconvincing, if energetic, plea for giving robber barons the benefit of realpolitik.Pub Date: June 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-2688-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2004
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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