A full-dress study of a great general whose life spanned the life of his young nation—from the Founding Fathers to the Civil War—but who has been largely neglected by historians. Johnson (History/Lipscomb Univ.) has delved into vast but scattered primary and secondary sources to write a scholarly biography of Scott, who was one of the first US Army officers to make a formal study of European military manuals, whose regulations established a code that brought new professionalism into 19th-century American warfare. The US Army, under Scott’s innovative leadership, thus became capable of withstanding the best European soldiers. Scott consulted with Lafayette and Prussian officers in Europe, and noted the fatal mistakes—looting and pillage—of Napoleon’s armies in the Spanish and Russian campaigns. Although he blundered early in his career in the Indian Wars in Florida and Alabama, he performed brilliantly in the Mexican War, and his strong discipline and fair dealing with the Mexican civilian population limited guerrilla attacks on his army. He was responsible for the first large-scale construction of amphibious ships in American history, and put them to good use in the successful landing at Vera Cruz. Johnson views Scott’s march from Vera Cruz and his capture of Mexico City in 1847 as the crowning achievements of his career; later, as a diplomat, Scott solved dangerous border disputes with Canada. Johnson shows that Scott never wore humility well: he was an aristocratic conservative forever in conflict with the strong egalitarian forces of his day. Scott’s boldness, knowledge, and ability as a soldier were mixed with conceit, arrogance, impatience, and aggressiveness. Ironically, his overweening ambition and his self-serving nature caused him to fail in politics. The definitive study: Johnson’s distinguished work gives a long-deserved but neglected credit to “Old Fuss and Feathers.— (16 illustrations, not seen) (History Book Club selection)
Pub Date: Nov. 6, 1998
ISBN: 0-7006-0914-8
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Univ. Press of Kansas
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 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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