An original, brightly written and well-researched cultural history certain to have wide appeal.
An absorbing meditation on Abraham Lincoln’s body, in life and death, and its role in shaping America’s memory of the man who saved the Union.
Taking a fresh approach to the legacy of the martyred president, Fox (History/Univ. of Southern California; Jesus in America: Personal Savior, Cultural Hero, National Obsession, 2004, etc.) examines the ways in which Lincoln’s iconic image has captured the American imagination, from recollections of his bruised and rigid corpse in the days immediately after his 1865 assassination to the public memorials, poems, books and movies that have turned his body into a "virtual embodiment of national purpose and glory." Lincoln as president was often deemed homely, even grotesque in appearance; Walt Whitman called his face "so awful ugly it becomes beautiful." Always accessible, the president had “put his body at the center of his public life,” endearing himself to the people. Thousands of mourners flocked to his funeral train, which became a moving shrine as it passed through Northern states. Recounting those days in exquisite detail, Fox shows how the “cult of Lincoln” lived on for a century, evinced in poetry (“O Captain! My Captain!”), in bronze and granite statues (some 87 statues by 1952, with one rising in formerly Confederate Richmond, Virginia, in 2003), and in the Lincoln Memorial (1922) in Washington, D.C., which “reimagined Lincoln’s unassuming and quirky body as a commanding symbol of the nation.” Lincoln’s commoner image lived on in the Lincoln penny, in Carl Sandburg’s mammoth biography and in films such as John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln (1939). Only the disillusionment of the Vietnam years could halt outright adulation of the president. More recently, Lincoln has been attacked in fiction by Gore Vidal, celebrated as a liberator by historians, and portrayed in popular culture, from a major Disneyland exhibit to Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln.
An original, brightly written and well-researched cultural history certain to have wide appeal.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2015
ISBN: 978-0393065305
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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
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
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