Too skimpy to interest serious historians, too dull and stiff for general readers looking for a quick overview. (For the...
One of America’s greatest presidents becomes a barely recognizable caricature.
It’s hard to imagine who the audience is supposed to be for this latest installment in the American Presidents series, presided over by Arthur Schlesinger. Of course, Jenkins (Churchill, 2001, etc.), who died earlier this year, had an unenviable task: to take the life of FDR—patrician, world leader, master politician—and condense it into fewer than 200 breezy pages. There’s plenty to choose from. Roosevelt was the scion of one of the country’s truest blue-blood families, and, strangely enough, the author seems most comfortable sketching this genteel Knickerbocker heritage. In describing the almost feudal atmosphere of the Hudson River Valley estates where FDR was raised, Jenkins points out how paradoxical it was that this man, “a product not of the heartland but of the extreme eastern edge and most Europe-centered part of America,” would be so successful at “transcending geography and uniting the continent.” Although permanently linked in the public mind, FDR and intellectual roustabout Teddy Roosevelt, whom FDR greatly admired and tried to emulate, were only distant cousins. Jenkins describes the halting and imperfect road that FDR took toward the White House, marked by such relatively low points as his undistinguished term as assistant secretary of the Navy and an unsuccessful vice-presidential candidacy in 1920. But even after FDR’s election as New York governor and finally his ascendancy to the White House in 1932 (an office he would hold until his death in 1945) this life fails to take flight. Only in limning the chinks in the normally revered FDR’s armor—especially in his less-than-romantic relationship with wife Eleanor—does Jenkins manage to render any of it terribly interesting.
Too skimpy to interest serious historians, too dull and stiff for general readers looking for a quick overview. (For the other descriptive extreme, see Conrad Black, above.)Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2003
ISBN: 0-8050-6959-3
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2003
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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