A lively introduction to a pair of flawed yet extraordinary figures in the nation’s movement westward.
A biography of explorer John C. Frémont and his equally adventurous wife, Jessie.
John C. Frémont (1813-1890), born out of wedlock to an aristocratic American mother and a lower-echelon French immigrant named Frémon, was a self-invented and self-inventing American archetype, unafraid of the hard work of building reputation and fortune. As a young military officer, he mounted surveying expeditions of the American West that opened the door to westward expansion—and, writes NPR Morning Edition host Inskeep (Jacksonland: President Andrew Jackson, Cherokee Chief John Ross, and a Great American Land Grab, 2015, etc.), may even have been “secretly told to conquer California,” picking a fight with Mexico in order to do so, even though Frémont had previously been opposed to a war that would enable “the extension of slavery.” John and Jessie, daughter of a prominent senator, were creatures of endless ambition, and between them, they gained and lost staggering amounts of money while engaging in quixotic gambles to attain the presidency. Though a unionist at heart, Frémont wasn’t shy about finding allies among the pro-slavery figures in office in the years leading up to Southern secession. He then rejoined the Army but was ineffective enough that Lincoln relieved him of any real responsibilities. Inskeep is a little more free-ranging in his view of Frémont than Tom Chaffin, whose 2002 study Pathfinder: John C. Frémont and the Course of American Empire is the last major study of the man. Inskeep extends the story to suggest that Jessie and John were the first modern celebrities—though Daniel Boone probably deserves that honor—and that John was instrumental in laying out the foundations for the Civil War, which had been cooking before his birth. Still, the book is highly readable, and the author draws renewed attention to these undeniably important historical personages, who are too often forgotten among the likes of Kit Carson, Ulysses S. Grant, and Horace Greeley.
A lively introduction to a pair of flawed yet extraordinary figures in the nation’s movement westward.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2435-3
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
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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