Although there are a few good points to pick out of this discussion, its subject might have been better served by a more...
A biography that sheds light on Maj. Gen. Arthur St. Clair (1734?–1818), a little-known Founding Father of the United States.
Although St. Clair fought in the American Revolution, served as president of the Continental Congress, was governor of the Northwest Territory, and gave much of his fortune to the American cause, he died in poverty and is little noted today. With this debut account, Phillips hopes to “tell the real story of this unrecognized American patriot.” Part One covers St. Clair’s Scottish heritage, including his connections with Freemasonry. Part Two follows him to the American colonies, where he served as a British officer, married in 1760, and retired from the British army two years later. He settled in Ligonier Valley, Pennsylvania, where he became a prominent landowner. In 1775, he accepted a commission in the Continental Army. Part Three covers the Revolutionary War, during which St. Clair participated in the Quebec invasion, helped organize militia, and took part in Gen. George Washington’s crossing of the Delaware River. His effort to defend Fort Ticonderoga against a larger British force ended in retreat. In Part Four, set after the war, St. Clair became governor of the Northwest Territory for 15 years; after a disastrous campaign against Native Americans in 1791, his reputation never recovered. Part Five considers his ultimate legacy. Phillips does amplify St. Clair’s contributions and shows how he was likely scapegoated for failures that were not of his making; for example, he points out that poor supplies, rather than poor leadership, helped to doom the aforementioned Native American campaign. But the book’s chronology is hard to follow, with chapters circling backward and forward to repeat events, information, and various points. Also, Phillips makes editorializing judgments (“This duty-bound patriot, St. Clair, had the courage to make decisions that needed making”) and relies on dubious sources, as when he offers Rhode Island’s Newport Tower as evidence of a 1398 Scottish visit to America, when it’s actually the remains of a mid-17th-century windmill. Notes, a bibliography, and an index are included.
Although there are a few good points to pick out of this discussion, its subject might have been better served by a more scholarly approach.Pub Date: Aug. 29, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4917-3782-8
Page Count: 328
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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