by Ted Widmer ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 4, 2008
An unusual and engaging tour of the horizon of American diplomacy that should appeal to both scholarly and general audiences.
Diplomatic history of the United States, emphasizing its spiritual underpinnings as much as wars and treaties.
Though Widmer (Martin Van Buren, 2004, etc.) does not ignore the traditional subjects within the field, his theological analysis takes him to places where other scholars don’t always tread. The former Clinton speechwriter sees the country’s longtime focus on spreading liberty throughout the world as a net positive, when done properly. He begins with a long examination of the nation’s founding, spending considerable time on the nation’s Puritan roots and showing how John Winthrop’s idea of a “city upon a hill” has inspired politicians of both parties ever since. Widmer is harder on Republican presidents, especially Reagan and the Bushes, whom he argues didn’t follow their lofty moralistic rhetoric with equally just policies. He describes the architects of the current administration’s foreign policy as “wolves in Wilsonian clothing.” One of the author’s key points is that Woodrow Wilson was more than a sentimental idealist, and his foreign policy was underrated. “By giving voice to what had been airy aspirations, and mobilizing the world’s peoples, and taking his plan far toward completion,” he writes, “Wilson proved to be a realist indeed.” Widmer covers many subjects at a brisk pace while synthesizing a vast array of primary and secondary sources. Occasionally the volume of information becomes overwhelming, but the author makes solid use of poetry and fiction to back up his arguments—the title comes from Herman Melville’s 1850 novel White-Jacket, which uses the phrase “ark of the liberties” to describe America’s role as a moral exemplar.
An unusual and engaging tour of the horizon of American diplomacy that should appeal to both scholarly and general audiences.Pub Date: July 4, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8090-2735-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2008
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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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