Not the most powerful of explanations. But there’s been worse, and stranger, and Blount’s version will be of value to...
Southern humorist Blount (Be Sweet, 1998, etc.) turns somber in this portrait of the troubled, tragic Confederate general.
Not that Robert E. Lee didn’t have a sense of humor, Blount writes by way of opening this brief but worthy biography. “He had tiny feet that he loved his children to tickle,” he told funny but generally clean stories around the bivouac fire, and he was highly regarded, as fellow soldier Joseph Johnston recalled, “as the only one of all the men I have known that could laugh at the faults and follies of his friends in such a manner as to make them ashamed without touching their affection for him, and to confirm their respect and sense of his superiority.” But Lee was also careworn and depressive, the scion of an aristocratic family that had fallen on hard times, and he was so absorbed by worries about personal honor that he missed out on much of the fun of life, instead preferring to pay meticulous attention to his studies at West Point, his comportment, and his personal appearance, widely lauded in his day as a model of manly beauty. As a general, Lee was hailed as well for his attention to his men’s well-being, though Blount does turn up a report or two complaining about his Virginia army’s lack of discipline when it wasn’t busily shooting at Yankees. Blount honors Lee without slipping into hagiography, a problem in much of the available literature—for, as he notes, most of the historiography devoted to the Civil War is the product of southerners who have accorded Lee demi-divine status. Even so, he lets Lee off rather lightly for some noteworthy errors, including the charge at Gettysburg that cost George Pickett half his division, which he explains thus: “When the usually repressed Lee felt an overpowering need for emotional release, and had an army at his disposal and another one in front of him, he couldn’t hold back.”
Not the most powerful of explanations. But there’s been worse, and stranger, and Blount’s version will be of value to students of the Civil War all the same.Pub Date: May 12, 2003
ISBN: 0-670-03220-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2003
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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