A sentimental biography of a First Lady best remembered- -perhaps unjustly—for her hairstyle. As Hillary Clinton's constantly changing hairstyles may reflect a search to define herself in her White House role, Mamie Eisenhower's stubborn loyalty to the famous Mamie bangs may reflect the loyalty to friends and family that was her outstanding characteristic. That, at least, is how granddaughter Eisenhower (Breaking Free, 1995) sees her. As the author describes Mamie, she was a wife and mother who ``was right for the 1950s . . . an era when the postwar nation was busily engaged in raising its children and rebuilding.'' Lively, charming, and ``rotten spoiled,'' Mamie Doud was one of four daughters in a very comfortable, if not wealthy, Denver family. Married at 19, she began a successful 50-year career as Dwight Eisenhower's wife. She learned discipline and self-control and made homes for him in two barren rooms in Texas, in a vermin-infested house in Panama, and, of course, in the White House. She was a skilled hostess and a tactful helpmate, enhancing the very important social side of her husband's army career but never interfering in his professional duties. Enduring the death of their three-year- old son, her own sometimes problematic health, plus prolonged separations when Ike was assigned overseas, Mamie behaved with dignity and discretion, even when rumors of an Eisenhower romance with his driver, Kay Summersby, flew across the Atlantic. There was no such romance, says the author, who also scotches rumors that Mamie was an alcoholic. Much information for this biography comes from family papers and letters, but even with these privileged documents, the Mamie who inspired a half-century of devotion from her famous husband never comes to life. For readers who are Eisenhower buffs and can fill in the great historical and personal gaps that mar this I-remember- Grandma chronicle. (65 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-374-21514-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1996
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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