A crisply told tale fleshing out one of American history’s more intriguing footnotes.
For 10 days, this unlikely spy was “among the most wanted fugitives in the history of the United States.”
The son of prosperous Connecticut parents, John Cook tried his hand at law, clerking and sales before attaching himself, more out of romance than principle, to the abolitionist movement. He fought under the notorious militia of Capt. John Brown in Bloody Kansas. In 1858, Brown dispatched Cook to Harper’s Ferry to gather information crucial to the plan to seize the federal arsenal, liberate slaves and take slave owners hostage. Following his capture after the failed raid and throughout the course of his trial, Cook’s betrayal of the locals (he fathered a child and married during his time in town) earned him an enmity exceeding even that felt toward Brown. When it became clear that he would repudiate Brown and name the old man’s “aiders or abettors” to save himself, Cook lost any support he might have received from Northern sympathizers. In this first full biography of any of Brown’s followers, Lubet (Law/Northwestern Univ.; Fugitive Justice: Runaways, Rescuers, and Slavery on Trial, 2010, etc.) is especially effective at capturing the courtroom drama surrounding Brown, Cook and their captured confederates. With sharp portraits of the lawyers, clear explanations of their various machinations and evocative descriptions of the legal proceedings, he brings to life the charges of treason and murder, the pleas for mercy and the poignancy of Cook’s pathetic confessions, insufficient for the prosecution, too little for the purposes of his defense, too shameless for Cook to maintain dignity, too detailed for Brown’s idolaters to bear. At age 30, the reckless Cook was hanged, mourned only by his wife and still-loving sisters.
A crisply told tale fleshing out one of American history’s more intriguing footnotes.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-300-18049-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2012
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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