A vigorous contextual treatment of a problematic president whose name mostly elicits puzzlement.
In the most recent installment of the publisher’s excellent American Presidents series, Finkelman (Law and Public Policy/Albany Law School) takes on previous biographers of Fillmore and gives a firm, unapologetic verdict based on the evidence. Millard Fillmore (1800–1874) was parochial, bigoted and more of an “accidental” leader than one to stand up for his convictions. Fillmore came of age during the great national debate over Manifest Destiny. Although he hailed from the abolitionist North and was a Whig, his actions bore out sympathy to the Southern cause. Born in Cayuga County, near Syracuse, to a family of farm renters, Fillmore mostly educated himself and decided on the study of law as a profession, eventually settling in Buffalo with his schoolteacher wife, Abigail. Tall, handsome, cautious and circumspect, he gravitated to “oddball political movements, conspiracy theories and ethnic hatred.” He would, over time, embrace such unorthodox groundswells as the Anti-Masonic Movement, the anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic North American Party in the 1840s and the Know-Nothing Party of the 1850s. A New York Congressman, he lost the campaign for governor, then failed to gain the Whig vice presidential nomination of 1844—Finkelman is mystified how he thought he could win, being without any national qualifications—though he was finally nominated four years later. With President Zachary Taylor’s sudden death, the completely unprepared Fillmore acted rashly by firing Taylor’s cabinet, then pressed to enact the divisive Fugitive Slave Act, which would “taint everything else he did,” even his important sponsoring of Commodore Matthew Perry’s expedition to Japan in 1852. Finkelman expertly depicts the shameful legacy of a president deeply out of touch with the beliefs of his country.
Pub Date: May 10, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-8715-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2011
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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