Sharply focused, wonderfully engaging documentation of the “ruins” of this American Ozymandias.
Examination of the shocking fall of the richest man in Revolutionary America.
Smith (History/Virginia Commonwealth Univ.) wisely focuses on the dizzying last few years of Robert Morris’ (1734-1806) life, from the height of his wealth and free-wheeling speculation in 1793, when he began planning an extravagant mansion for himself and his family in Philadelphia, to his incarceration in debtors prison six years later and penurious death in 1806. How could this disgrace have happened to the nation’s first “superintendent of finance,” appointed unanimously by Congress in 1781? Morris was an English immigrant who worked his way up as a merchant, becoming a partner in the trading firm Willing, Morris and Company at age 21. He was elected to Pennsylvania’s state assembly (and later, senate), and he was instrumental in building the republic’s navy, equipping the army, funding the states, stabilizing the currency, paying the government’s debts and establishing the Bank of North America. These and many other exalted tasks won him lifelong friendships with the leading Founding Fathers, such as George Washington, who dined with him in jail. A risk-taker with “an appetite for action,” Morris fell into the lure of land speculation, as many other leaders did, buying up millions of acres of land in upstate New York, as well as floating numerous industrial ventures. The clincher was his relationship with engineer and architect Pierre Charles L’Enfant, who had designed the layout of the new capital, Washington, D.C., before resigning in a sulk. Together, the two allowed their overweening ambition and sense of persecution to propel the erection of a grand mansion on an entire block of Philadelphia purchased by Morris. It was a gorgeous “folly,” doomed to incompletion and eventual dismantlement by the resentment of the republican masses.
Sharply focused, wonderfully engaging documentation of the “ruins” of this American Ozymandias.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-300-19604-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
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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