A lively, well-written, and most timely study of diplomacy in action.
Here’s breaking news for the Francophobic freedom-fries set: without France, there would have been no United States.
“The majority of the guns fired on the British at Saratoga were French,” writes ace biographer/historian Schiff (Véra [Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov], 1999; Saint-Exupéry, 1994). “Four years later, when the British set down their muskets at Yorktown, they surrendered to forces that were nearly equal parts French and American, all of them fed and clothed and paid by France, and protected by de Grasse’s fleet.” Moreover, she adds, the French came up with the equivalent of $9 billion to secure American independence. But without Benjamin Franklin, Schiff argues, France likely would not have come to the aid of the fledgling republic. It was not only that Franklin, who a few years before had been an ardent royalist, presented the American cause as an ideal way for France to play knavish tricks on Britain, but also that Franklin was not Silas Deane. The latter, a staid Connecticut businessman, was Congress’s representative in Paris, having arrived there just three days after the Declaration of Independence was promulgated; his duties also involved espionage, but Deane was an unable spy. Moreover, he was a bumpkin compared to the British ambassador, who had a grand time announcing every American defeat to the court at Versailles. Franklin’s reputation as a sophisticate and man of letters and science preceded him, and he found himself welcome and even lionized. His steady lobbying soon brought material aid to the much-suffering rebels, though the French and Americans forged a partnership “founded on various illusions about the past and a general misunderstanding of the future”; the professional French military scorned the American militia as mere rabble, and the French in general felt that the Americans showed too little gratitude to them for their help. Which evens the score, one supposes, for subsequent American complaints that the French have been insufficiently grateful for our help. . . .
A lively, well-written, and most timely study of diplomacy in action.Pub Date: April 2, 2005
ISBN: 0-8050-6633-0
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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