A thoughtful account, likening Nehru to Thomas Jefferson in ways both positive and negative.
A well-crafted life of the Indian politician and independence-movement hero.
Like Mao Zedong in China, Jawaharlal Nehru has lost a lot of the stature he enjoyed in India half a century ago, in much the same way and for much the same reason. “His mistakes are magnified,” writes novelist (Riot, 2001, etc.) and UN official Tharoor, “his achievements belittled.” The Indian government continues to profess the four tenets of Nehruvian thought—democratic institution-building, pan-Indian secularism, socialist economic policies, and a foreign policy of nonalignment—but, Tharoor adds, “all have been challenged, and strained to the breaking point, by the developments of recent years.” The author charts the evolution of Nehru’s life, showing how the spoiled only child of a Brahmin Kashmiri family shed his privileged, anglophilic attitudes as he became ever more aware of the injustices of British colonial rule; ironically, Tharoor suggests, he was radicalized after returning to India from England and realizing that the “rights of Englishmen . . . could not be his because he was not English enough to enjoy them,” even as he once confessed that his years at Harrow and Cambridge had made him “as much prejudiced in favor of England and the English as it was possible for an Indian to be.” Nehru developed into a shrewd practical politician and editorialist who entered into powerful alliances, notably with Mohandas Gandhi, but who charted his own course. Gandhi repeatedly chastised Nehru for his radicalism, and indeed Nehru was not shy of taking up arms rather than following Gandhi’s peaceful example—after independence, when Nehru ordered the Indian army to seize the Portuguese province of Goa, John F. Kennedy told the Indian ambassador in Washington “that India might consider delivering fewer self-righteous sermons on nonviolence.”
A thoughtful account, likening Nehru to Thomas Jefferson in ways both positive and negative.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-55970-697-X
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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