A remarkable behind-the-scenes look at Dr. Benjamin Spock, the guru of parenting who, as is often the case with experts, failed to heed his own advice. Dr. Spock may have been America’s pediatric answer man, but at home he was aloof and emotionally distant, a man more concerned with appearances than with finding real solutions to the problems that plagued his family. And the problems were many. As his bestselling book, The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, took off, Spock was rarely there for his two sons, Michael and John. Nor was he there for his wife, Jane Cheney, who felt embittered that he never credited the help she gave him. An insecure woman, she soon slipped into a lifetime of therapy and alcohol and medication abuse, eventually suffering two nervous breakdowns. After nearly 50 years of marriage, Spock divorced his wife and shortly thereafter married a woman 40 years his junior. Not long after, one of Spock’s grandsons committed suicide. Through it all, Spock remained insistent that the family maintain its facade as the country’s all-American family. While it might have been tempting, and indeed much easier, to write a biography that perpetuated this image, award-winning Newsday writer Maier (Newhouse: All the Glitter, Power and Glory of America’s Richest Media Empire and the Secretive Man Behind It, 1994) does not. To Spock’s credit, Maier prepared this warts-and-all look with his subject’s full cooperation. The result is a meticulously researched, extraordinarily full portrait of a man who was a revolutionary, both in the psychoanalytic understanding he introduced to pediatrics and in the dedication he brought to social concerns later in his life. More than just a biography, this book necessarily tells the broader story of the nation in the second half of the 20th century—a period that Spock, with his revolutionary theories, helped to shape. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: May 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-15-100203-7
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1998
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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