An engaging resurrection of Grant featuring excellent maps and character sketches.
This scholarly but readable biography of the Civil War general and president finds some new facets in understanding “the silent man.”
Deriving much of his scholarship from Grant’s extensive letters to his wife, Julia Dent, and from The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, edited by John Y. Simon, White (A. Lincoln: A Biography, 2009, etc.) offers a fresh assessment of this enigmatic leader, who, like his Homeric namesake, failed at many things before he succeeded in life. Indeed, the author rebuts many of the long-held notions about Grant—e.g., that he was nonintellectual and that he was a heavy drinker. He was first and foremost a reader, though largely self-educated. He certainly could not have graduated from West Point without an extensive intellect, and while he was never a hunter, he had a magical way with horses, in particular. Both these traits endeared him to his longtime love and wife, Julia, who was also a horsewoman and avid reader. Grant was raised by fervent Methodist parents and was a churchgoing man himself. Though he probably had to resign from the army in 1854 at age 32 because of a drinking episode, he was henceforth known to inflict strict discipline on his troops regarding alcohol. (Smoking cigars seemed to have been his vice, and he died of throat cancer.) While White does not provide a nuanced chronicle of the Civil War, which can be found in countless other histories, he does ably portray a sense of the transformation of his subject from civilian to soldier and, from there, to reluctant hero. Northerners and President Abraham Lincoln were clamoring for victories, and Grant actually delivered, most spectacularly in seizing control of the Mississippi at Vicksburg. The author portrays a humble, gentle, independent soul—a writer, in the end, who found his voice writing his extraordinary memoirs just before his death in 1885.
An engaging resurrection of Grant featuring excellent maps and character sketches.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6902-6
Page Count: 880
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
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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