While too many authors have chronicled Churchill’s rich life for this to be considered truly definitive, Jenkins’s inside...
A thoughtful, comprehensive portrait of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s remarkable life.
Lord Jenkins (Gladstone, 1997, etc.) adds to his reputation as England’s foremost political biographer with this portrayal of Churchill’s mercurial character and career. He carefully avoids the hero worship or demonization affected by many historians in favor of a balanced assessment of Churchill’s work in literature and politics. The perennial statesman’s authorial aspirations, Jenkins asserts, in addition to eventually winning him the Nobel Prize for Literature, also laid the rhetorical foundation for many of the last century’s most memorable speeches. At the same time, his genius for oratory assured Churchill political positions in which he would have a profound impact on Great Britain’s foreign and domestic policies. These twin ambitions, Jenkins argues, prepared Churchill for and eventually catapulted him into his most famous role as Britain’s wartime prime minister after Neville Chamberlain’s notorious appeasement of Adolf Hitler. In the aftermath of WWII, Churchill fell from power along with Britain’s need for such a larger-than-life leader. The author devotes substantial space to Churchill’s selfish attempts to hold onto the international prestige he had earned as England’s wartime leader. His evenhanded analysis demonstrates the damage Churchill’s political ambition wreaked on both his party and his own reputation. Even in light of Jenkins’s inclusion of the politician’s almost childlike idiosyncrasies, Churchill’s infectious exuberance and tenacious spirit shine through, insuring that his legacy remains that of Britain’s most impressive modern leader.
While too many authors have chronicled Churchill’s rich life for this to be considered truly definitive, Jenkins’s inside perspective on British politics makes his work essential reading for those interested in Churchill’s life and times. (32 pages b&w photos, maps)Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2001
ISBN: 0-374-12354-3
Page Count: 736
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2001
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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