A nuanced portrait of leadership, and a fine complement to recent portraits of Churchill by, among others, John Keegan and...
The greatest Briton—so a 2002 BBC poll declared Winston Churchill—comes in for scrutiny in this absorbing profile by military historian Holmes.
Of the 20th-century’s politicians, Churchill seemed ablest to swirl in the currents of controversy without drowning. He was eminently practical; he worked tremendously hard; he was unquestionably brave; and in almost everything he turned his hand to, he proved a “gifted amateur.” He also nourished contradictions, among them an odd steadiness against what was almost certainly advanced alcoholism and a fondness for wearing uniforms; “apart from that foible,” remarks Holmes of the latter, “he was the antithesis of a militarist.” Yet for all his fine qualities, Churchill was not altogether admirable; as Holmes reveals, he was something of a bully toward his widowed (but by no means cowed) mother, and throughout his life he was an opportunist through and through. Early fame came to him, for instance, when Churchill escaped from a prison camp during the Boer War, leaving two fellow inmates behind; though Holmes believes that Churchill did not intend to abandon them, “I cannot imagine him waiting too long on the far side of that wall.” Churchill, however, was plenty self-critical and self-aware. One of Holmes’s discoveries in the course of this study of character is especially revealing: haunted by the needless deaths of thousands of Commonwealth soldiers at Gallipoli, a WWI campaign he had championed, Churchill was near-paralyzed at the thought that the Normandy landings of WWII might fail. In the face of neocons who are now busily trying to claim Churchill as a forebear, Holmes reminds us that Churchill was a liberal whom opportunity, and opportunism, swept into the Conservative Party, “which only grudgingly accepted him.” He reminds us, too, that Churchill was early on an advocate of a strong united Europe—in part as a way of containing American expansionism as well as Soviet ambitions.
A nuanced portrait of leadership, and a fine complement to recent portraits of Churchill by, among others, John Keegan and John Lukacs.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-465-03082-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2005
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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