Unexceptional wisdom breezily packaged.
From a journalist and historian specializing in the lives of the Founders, lessons in leadership drawn from the plantation, military and political career of George Washington.
Washington’s colorful contemporary, Gouverneur Morris, disparaged books on leadership, dismissing them as merely “utopian,” a skepticism National Review senior editor Brookhiser (What Would the Founders Do?: Our Questions, Their Answers, 2006, etc.) appears to share. But the author forges ahead, addressing his theme in topical fashion, distilling a series of maxims from a variety of problems and situations Washington handled. The vignettes are always interesting: Washington insisting on the importance of proper latrines and inoculations to ensure the army’s health, diversifying crops at Mount Vernon, finessing the Continental Congress, putting down mutiny within the army and later rebellion within the young country, keeping the peace between Hamilton and Jefferson, dealing with the betrayal of Benedict Arnold. At the same time the “lessons” drawn from these and many other slices of Washington’s life are problematic, if only because they are so often contradictory. Washington observed lines of authority (deferring to the advice and consent of the Senate), except when he circumvented them (seeking funding for the army). He was patient (settling on a strategy for the war), except when he was bold (seizing the moment at Yorktown). He was a hands-on manager (of his plantation), unless he was wisely delegating (speeches to Madison, artillery chores to Knox or matters of high finance to Hamilton). He made use of friends (Lafayette) until he broke with them (Knox). By the end of Brookhiser’s colloquial, good-humored analysis, we’re persuaded that, while no leader in American history may be more worthy of emulation, the mature Washington’s signal virtue was his consistently sound, often spectacularly wise judgment, a faculty honed throughout a lifetime presiding over highly important matters and one not easily imitated. Apparently Gouverneur Morris was correct.
Unexceptional wisdom breezily packaged.Pub Date: May 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-465-00302-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2008
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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