It's hard to write a bad biography of Churchill but even harder to find something new to say, and historian Rose (Hebrew Univ., Israel) doesn't find much. He is, however, particularly good on his subject's personality: ``Of course I am an egotist,'' Churchill once told Clement Attlee. ``Where do you get if you aren't?'' Self-centered, frequently bombastic, living in great houses, surrounded by masses of servants, he was saved from some of the worst effects of this self-indulgence by his sense of humor: When his faithful assistant, Eddie Marsh, told him that he favored ``kissing [Uncle Sam] on both cheeks,'' Churchill replied, ``But not on all four.'' Rose is also perceptive on the politician's relationship with his wife, Clementine, which was somewhat more complicated than is usually supposed. While it was a love match, both sometimes felt the need to get away from each other, and her judgment, both political and personal, was frequently better than his. On some substantive matters, Rose is neglectful of recent research, offering less than satisfactory coverage of Churchill's role as a social reformer, his choice of the Board of Trade as his first Cabinet post, his more intricate political calculations, and his success in becoming more acceptable to the Labor Party before WW II—about which a number of authors have written well in the past few years. The last omission in particular leads the author to make an assertion that would be rejected by many historians of the period, namely that the Earl of Halifax could have become prime minister in 1940 if he had wanted to. Rose responds persuasively, however, to the recent charge that Churchill ruined Britain by refusing to make a compromise peace with Hitler, a suggestion that depends on a reliability that Hitler was never inclined to demonstrate. Sifts the old soil quite pleasantly, but doesn't break new ground. (30 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Aug. 16, 1995
ISBN: 0-02-874009-2
Page Count: 450
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1995
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
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
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