A lively one-volume treatment well-suited to libraries and schools.
This focused study of the four term–winning president emphasizes his instinctive feel for the public mood.
Having previously written extensively about John F. Kennedy (Camelot’s Court and An Unfinished Life), among other presidents and world leaders (Nixon and Kissinger, The Lost Peace, Lone Star Rising, etc.), Dallek is a seasoned presidential historian and biographer. Here, he writes with authority about Franklin Roosevelt’s political life and mission to create a “new social order” during a time of “enduring national transformation.” Throughout his remarkable political career, Roosevelt managed to steer the country as “one organic entity, [reaffirming] that no interest, no class, no section, is either separate or supreme above the interests of all”—views he expressed in an interview before his first presidential win in 1932. This was especially surprising given his own patrician background (also that of his wife and cousin, Eleanor) and the general expectation of dictatorial leadership during the Depression crisis. Dallek examines several formative factors that contributed greatly to Roosevelt’s ability to successfully tap the public sentiment and address significant issues—e.g., his three years of practicing law, which helped bring him “out from under the shelter” of his hereditary social circle of “Hyde Park, Campobello, Cambridge, and 65th Street”; his formidably kind wife, who was truly alarmed by the living conditions of the poor and disenfranchised where she toured during the Depression, operating as his eyes and ears; and, of course, being stricken by polio and his trips to Warm Springs, Georgia, where he mingled with the similarly afflicted and marginalized. The author also effectively shows how Roosevelt was an astute political animal who sometimes made questionable decisions for political expedience, such as failing to push for an anti-lynching law for fear of losing white Southern support, incarcerating Japanese-Americans during World War II, and fumbling over saving Jews from persecution by Nazi Germany.
A lively one-volume treatment well-suited to libraries and schools.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-525-42790-2
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
SEEN & HEARD
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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