An enlightening and entertaining blend of history and edged attitude.
Another Vowell-ian romp through history, politics, and pop culture, this time revisiting the story of Lafayette, the French contributions to victory in the American Revolution, and his farewell tour through the United States in 1824.
Readers of Vowell’s previous books (Unfamiliar Fishes, 2011, etc.) will recognize yet another pleasantly snarky work that belongs on any shelf of first-rate satire. Her peripatetic research techniques remain: visit the sites, walk the ground, read the books, talk with relevant folks (here, she recounts her chat with a Lafayette impersonator at Williamsburg). Vowell also continually yanks us back to the present, commenting sharply on such things as our current political polarization. The “sweet-natured republic Lafayette foretold,” she writes, hasn’t exactly occurred. Vowell also uses slang and cliché as light artillery, deploying them so that shells explode expectedly. When she writes that Lafayette was trying to put the toothpaste back into the tube, we laugh as well as learn. Vowell takes some bayonet thrusts at religious fanatics, at the current American right, and at the brainless hatred of all things French during the Gulf War (despite the fact that the French saved us at Yorktown). Although she focuses principally on the war years, she does cover, lightly, Lafayette’s 1824 return—and (rare for her) misses an opportunity to mention that young Edgar Allan Poe, at 15 a member of the Morgan Riflemen, participated in the celebrations in Richmond. Several times, the author mentions the British spy Maj. John André but neglects to note his spectral appearances in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” But she doesn’t miss much else. Vowell reminds us of George Washington’s early failures in the war (and of those in the government who wanted to replace him) and that there used to be an “Evacuation Day” in New York City to celebrate the departure of the British.
An enlightening and entertaining blend of history and edged attitude.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59463-174-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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