A vastly engrossing 19th-century rags-to-riches autobiography by the somewhat priggish, but shrewd and observant, founder of the Mellon family fortune. Thomas Mellon (18131908) wrote this 1885 memoir solely as a ``memento of affection'' for his descendants, anticipating ``that it will not be for sale in bookstores, nor any new edition published.'' Mellon was born in Ireland to farmers of modest means who emigrated to Poverty Point, near Pittsburgh, when he was five years old. He recounts a happy, if Spartan, upbringing there on his father's farm. A visit to Pittsburgh impressed the nine-year-old Mellon with the magnificence of the city, and at the age of 17, deciding against farming in favor of getting an education, Mellon suddenly stopped his father from purchasing a farm for him. Interspersing college attendance with teaching and farm chores, Mellon attended Western University in Pittsburgh, read law with a prominent Pittsburgh attorney, and became a member of the bar in 1838. He married in 1843 and had eight children; became an eminent lawyer and judge and a successful investor; and founded a predecessor of the Mellon Bank in 1870. Mellon's narrative of his happy family life and prominent, though not terribly eventful, career forms the backdrop for a wide variety of opinions and observations, sage and otherwise: on the importance of marrying for discretion rather than love; on the heavy responsibilities of a judge; on the Great Panic of 1873; on the declining work ethic and increased crime rate Mellon saw around him in newly industrialized America; and on the (not always positive) transformative effects of new inventions created in his lifetime. A charming memoir with some surprisingly meditative reflections, by an entrepreneurial leader of the time, on the bewildering changes wrought by 19th-century industrialism. (Photos and maps)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8229-3777-8
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Univ. of Pittsburgh
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1994
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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