A timely, amusing, and occasionally eye-opening exercise.
On the theory that experience is the best predictor of future performance, Morris (Supreme Commander: MacArthur’s Triumph in Japan, 2014, etc.) examines and evaluates, as any hiring committee might, the resumes of 15 men, all past applicants for the job of president.
To judge the fitness for the Oval Office of figures as towering as Washington and Lincoln, as dubious as William Randolph Hearst, and as little remembered as William Henry Harrison, the author uses four criteria: “accomplishments,” “intangibles,” “judgment,” and “overall” (a summary of all the information known about the candidate). Notwithstanding the intentional diversity of his list, a couple “candidates” appear out of place: the otherwise estimable Gen. George C. Marshall was never seriously considered for Franklin Roosevelt’s vice president, and Jefferson Davis was elected president, yes, but of the Confederacy. Still, the disagreements readers will have with Morris, his methodology, and his assessments are part of the fun of any exercise like this. As he rates the aspirants, the author turns up interesting little nuggets about each: why Jefferson in 1826 thought DeWitt Clinton was the greatest living American and why Lincoln, too, sought to emulate the father of the Erie Canal; how Ronald Reagan devised his own version of shorthand to deliver his seemingly effortless speeches; why Robert Kennedy and Barry Goldwater were perhaps too hot for the presidency, Herbert Hoover and Samuel Tilden, too cold; how Henry Wallace failed to match self-discipline with his prodigious intellect; why Maine’s Bowdoin College awarded an honorary degree to Jefferson Davis two years before the Civil War; how Wendell Willkie, without ever holding public office, captured the Republican nomination; why the Democrats twice denied their top honor to William McAdoo, the most accomplished treasury secretary since Hamilton. Why wisdom trumps experience, judgment beats sheer hard work, broad intelligence bests narrow brilliance—these considerations, too, figure into Morris’ appraisals.
A timely, amusing, and occasionally eye-opening exercise.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61234-850-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Potomac Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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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