Uneven but entertaining.
A highly readable exercise forthrightly modeled on JFK’s Profiles in Courage, examining nine instances in which American presidents have acted against their own political interest.
Some are well known, others not—or at least not in their full details. Everyone knows, for example, that the Emancipation Proclamation aroused scorn in the rebellious states; few recall how bitterly it divided Lincoln’s nominal supporters in the North. Whalen (Social Science/Boston Univ.) opens each tale of moral courage with a mini-portrait of the president involved. Some episodes feel too large for the book’s slight frame: Andrew Jackson’s war against the aristocratic Bank of the United States, which plunged the nation into financial panic; Teddy Roosevelt’s prosecution of J. Pierpont Morgan’s Northern Securities Company as an illegal railroad combination under the antitrust laws; and FDR’s Lend Lease agreement with Britain, which frightened and angered a large portion of the mostly isolationist public. For the most part, however, the author has chosen bite-sized incidents of presidential courage perfectly suited to his theme: Truman’s firing of insubordinate World War II icon General Douglas MacArthur; Chester Arthur’s unexpected transformation from a machine politician to a civil service reformer; JFK’s 1963 address committing his administration to civil rights; Gerald Ford’s unpopular pardoning of Richard Nixon. Whalen pointedly distinguishes between presidential courage and presidential recklessness, using the example of George Bush’s decision to invade Iraq, but at the same time somewhat contradictorily laments recent presidents’ willingness “to sacrifice principle for the sake of political expediency.” He acknowledges this will not be “the final word,” and indeed one might wonder why Jimmy Carter’s relinquishment of the Panama Canal in 1977 was not every bit as morally courageous as Grover Cleveland’s principled refusal to annex Hawaii in 1893.
Uneven but entertaining.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-56663-630-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Ivan Dee/Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2007
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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