Alford paints some intriguing shades of gray in this elucidating portrait.
The “first full-length biography” of Abraham Lincoln’s assassin offers much nuance and complexity to the killer, bordering on the downright sympathetic.
Reams have been written about John Wilkes Booth (1838-1865), who was shot in the ensuing manhunt on April 26, 1865, at the age of 26, yet much of the anecdotal claims have been tempered by hysteria over the assassination and don’t hold up to the light. Alford (History/Northern Virginia Community Coll.; Prince Among Slaves, 1976) sifts through the more balanced, credible sources of those who knew Booth before the assassination to flesh out a surprisingly engaging portrait of the brilliant young actor and deeply riven sympathizer to the Southern cause. The product of a British-born actor father (and bigamist) who settled his family in Virginia and grew alcoholic and erratic, young Booth was, by all accounts, a winning personality and a favorite of his mother and his numerous siblings. Agreeing early on not to bring her grief by enlisting in the Army when the war broke out, Booth worked at various stages in Northern cities during the conflict at the behest of his older, more seasoned actor brother, Edwin. He essentially stifled his true anti-abolitionist feelings, which had been radicalized with John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry. (A clue to Booth’s increasingly obsessive behavior was the fact that he attended Brown’s hanging.) Alford portrays a young man who was delighted by the applause, riches and fame he gained in his brief, meteoric rise as a dramatic actor yet alarmed by the national disintegration and tormented by his uselessness: Did his obsessive plotting about Lincoln grow out of his sense of duty to his beleaguered South, or was it a fantastic “self-conscious performance with himself as star”?
Alford paints some intriguing shades of gray in this elucidating portrait.Pub Date: April 2, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-19-505412-5
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2015
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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