A lively account of Clara Barton's life during the Civil War that reveals both the character of this compelling woman and the awfulness of war. Oates (Abraham Lincoln, 1984; Let The Trumpet Sound, 1982) quotes liberally from her voluminous correspondence, much of it apparently written with an eye toward publication. Beginning his story with the opening days of the war, when Barton was working in the U.S. Patent Office in Washington, D.C., Oates gives a vivid portrait of life in the wartime capital. Within months, Clara, as he always refers to her, became a one-woman relief agency, collecting clothing, food, whiskey, and medical supplies from women in her home state of Massachusetts and distributing them to soldiers. She persuaded officials to let her take her supplies onto the battlefield at Antietam, becoming the only Northern female nurse to serve under enemy fire. Later she served at the battles at Fredericksburg and Battery Wagner, and when the fighting ended, she aided in the search for missing soldiers, a task that took her to the notorious Andersonville prison. Oates makes much of her brief fling with a married man, Colonel John Elwell, even providing details of mid-19th-century contraceptive methods, although there is no evidence that Barton or her lover used them. He claims that this is the story Barton wanted told. Maybe, maybe not. Her bravery under fire, her drive and endurance, her sense of duty and propriety, her ability to rouse public support for her relief efforts, and her skill at manipulating the military and political bureaucracies are all shown here, but so are her depressions, her inability to work within existing nursing and relief services, and her outrage when other women infringed on her territory. Splendidly detailed narrative with special appeal for Civil War buffs and lovers of history—and herstory. Includes maps—not seen.
Pub Date: April 21, 1994
ISBN: 0-02-923405-0
Page Count: 450
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1994
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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