An intimate, richly detailed portrait of a powerful political figure.
The formative experiences that shaped a political mind.
John Quincy Adams (1767-1848) began keeping a diary when he was 11 years old, a project that resulted in tens of thousands of pages. To produce this perceptive biography, Levin (Edith and Woodrow: The Wilson White House, 2001, etc.) has judiciously mined that abundant material, along with Adams’ prolific correspondence and his wife’s memoirs. Although considered by contemporaries “a frigid and icy New Englander,” Adams, as the author portrays him, was a passionate man, often lonely, self-critical and exacting of others (Thomas Jefferson, for one, who seemed to Adams shifty and calculating). Besides revealing his emotions and intellectual growth, his diary offers a vivid record of the tumultuous political events that he witnessed, including the American Revolution, Louisiana Purchase and Napoleon’s doomed invasion of Russia. Adams made his first trip to Europe in 1778, as his father’s companion and secretary, and at age 14, he accompanied Ambassador Francis Dana to Russia, interpreting peace negotiations conducted in French. By the time Adams enrolled at Harvard, he was a worldly young man but had no clear direction. Following his father’s advice, he began a legal apprenticeship in the small town of Newburyport, where, isolated and anxious about his future, he plummeted into overwhelming depression—an affliction that would recur throughout his life. His parents, the estimable John and Abigail, had high hopes for their son. If he achieved anything less than professional prominence, they told him, “it will be owing to your own laziness, slovenliness, and obstinacy.” As a minister to The Hague, London, Prussia and Russia, senator from Massachusetts, secretary of state under James Monroe and professor of rhetoric at Harvard, Adams had no lack of achievement and honors. Levin focuses on his education—as a lawyer, statesman, husband and father—ending in 1815, with major roles yet before him.
An intimate, richly detailed portrait of a powerful political figure.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-1137279620
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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.
