A book of American history for all, but lawyers and journalists will especially appreciate it.
A Pulitzer Prize–winning historian looks back at the 1730s, when a single court case established the first step toward freedom of the press.
Kluger (The Bitter Waters of Medicine Creek: A Tragic Clash Between White and Native America, 2011, etc.) presents the story of John Peter Zenger (1697-1746). After apprenticing to William Bradford, the appointed royal printer, and serving as his journeyman, Zenger set up his own printing company. It was not as easy as it sounds, and he had considerable backing. This is also the story of the wealthy Lewis Morris. It was the legal engagement required to secure his inheritance that set him on his quest for lifelong learning and power. Eventually becoming one of the strongest politicians in the New York area, he was the senior member of the New Jersey Provincial Council. Kluger also tells the tale of the royally appointed governor serving New York and, after Morris’ successful petition, New Jersey. Historically, governors sent to the Colonies were strong on connections but short on capital. As such, there were many instances of self-serving governors, and Morris’ role in the recall of two of those illustrates how strong his powers were—that is, until William Cosby took over. He immediately took sides against Morris’ faction, siding with the trade barons against him. Here, Zenger met the needs of Morris and his brilliant cohorts. They hired Zenger to publish the New-York Weekly Journal to be an irritant to the governor. Wise to the draconian libel laws, they carefully avoided any illegal steps. Kluger takes some time to get to the meat of the story, but the attempts to indict Zenger and the eventual trial are enlightening and frightening—frightening to see how easily the press could be quashed and enlightening to see how that freedom was secured.
A book of American history for all, but lawyers and journalists will especially appreciate it.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-393-24546-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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