Densely researched, swift-moving account full of fighting detail.
Exploration of some of the unsung early war correspondents in New York and London who created the model for vivid prose and humanitarian alarm.
With the installation of a trans-Atlantic telegraph cable connecting America and Europe in 1858, the race for newsgathering took off, while the eruption of the Civil War shifted reader interest from local scandal to “the exclusive battle dispatch that could be issued in an extra edition and hawked on the street at great profit.” Patton (Patriot Pirates: The Privateer War for Freedom and Fortune in the American Revolution, 2008, etc.) captures the gritty, wild-eyed quality of trailblazing early newspapermen like John Russell Young, who made his name covering the Battle of Bull Run, and the Ohioan Januarius MacGahan, along with their exacting editors—only two women are featured: one is MacGahan’s comely Russian wife, the other a wealthy humanitarian widow, Emily Strangford, who met the reporter while setting out to help victims of Turkish-Bulgarian violence in 1876. All the New York newspapers—e.g., James Gordon Bennett’s Herald, Horace Greeley’s Tribune and Henry J. Raymond’s Times—competed with one another for the scoop, learning the value of “creating news instead of waiting to record it”—e.g., the Herald’s sending the rookie reporter Henry Morton Stanley to Central Africa in pursuit of the incommunicado missionary David Livingstone. MacGahan and other American expat correspondents in Paris stumbled on the Franco-Prussian War; he was horrified by the bloody insurrection, taking pains to characterize the violence fairly in his emotional dispatches for the Herald, for which he was highly praised. Another visionary correspondent was the extraordinarily talented artist and writer Frank Millet, who plunged into covering the Russian-Turkish War of 1877 by crisscrossing Central Asia during an era of difficult land travel and illustrating his essays with tremendously moving sketches of the bloodied and wounded. These correspondents became heroes of their time and doubled at times as capable explorers.
Densely researched, swift-moving account full of fighting detail.Pub Date: April 29, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-307-37721-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2014
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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