A workmanlike biography of a relatively minor character in the vast Roosevelt saga.
Biography of Theodore Roosevelt’s first son, Ted Jr. (1887-1944), who made a greater soldier than politician.
Next to that of his father, the story of Ted Jr. makes fairly lackluster reading, although the eldest son was similarly athletic, enthusiastic, and brave. According to Brady (A Death in San Pietro: The Untold Story of Ernie Pyle, John Huston, and the Fight for Purple Heart Valley, 2013, etc.), the dean of the School of Aviation at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Ted proved himself courageously on the battlefield in both world wars. However, he lost his hour in the political arena as a Republican (like his father) with the rises of his older cousin Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Democratic juggernaut. The author does not supply much of his own psychological dissection of Ted’s character, but he notes how the undersized youth with a “wayward” right eye and an early pugnacious behavior was clearly trying very hard to make his Rough Rider father proud. Roosevelt Sr. gently but firmly squelched his son’s desire to attend West Point—such was the president’s legendary ability to persuade and inspire awe—yet Brady hardly questions the young Harvard graduate’s decision to take a menial position in a carpet factory. Perhaps there was a stronger influence by his starchy, no-nonsense mother Edith than is indicated here. The breakout of war (both times) seemed to have saved Ted from obscurity, and his heroic actions in both wars gained him awards of valor. Moreover, Ted was instrumental in establishing the American Legion to honor all veterans (not just veterans of foreign wars) after WWI. Ultimately, as the author underscores, the rivalry between the Oyster Bay Roosevelts and the Hyde Park Roosevelts determined the political fate of Ted Jr.
A workmanlike biography of a relatively minor character in the vast Roosevelt saga.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-101-98815-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: New American Library
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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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