An impressive combination of scrupulous scholarship and powerful storytelling.
A biography of Andrew Jackson that focuses on a period before he was president of the United States—specifically, his rivalry with a U.S. Army general during the War of 1812.
Jackson detested the British—he blamed the deaths of his mother and brothers, who died of various causes during the Revolutionary War period, on them—and deeply pined for military glory, which offered two irrepressible incentives for him to fight in the War of 1812. Professional historians have meticulously scrutinized Jackson’s life, particularly his seemingly insatiable ambition, but debut author Turnbow, a Tennessee-based attorney, turns his attention to a comparatively neglected but intriguing part of his rise to fame, telling the story of the undying antagonism between Jackson and Gen. James Wilkinson. The latter was also profoundly ambitious, and he saw Jackson as a competitor in a zero-sum game for power and acclaim. He aimed to thwart Jackson’s success, even at the expense of military victory. He attempted to deny Jackson’s Tennessee Volunteers necessary supplies, tried to divert Jackson’s troops away from New Orleans to the Spanish province of East Florida, and worked to tarnish Jackson’s name and orchestrate his demotion. Jackson rightly believed that Wilkinson was a treasonous agent of Spain; indeed, the general provided Spain with sensitive intelligence regarding the United States’ plans for westward expansion. Turnbow paints Wilkinson as a “master of manipulation and deception” who always seemed capable of gaining a strategic upper hand. Throughout, the author painstakingly depicts the historical context, including the precariousness of the United States as a still-fledgling nation and the threat posed by hostile Native American warriors; his account of Tecumseh’s extraordinary attempt to create a confederation to oppose American settlement is among the highlights of his rigorously researched study. Turnbow also lucidly captures Jackson’s impressive courage as well as the ways in which his ambition undermined his judgment; he nearly ruined his career by associating with the treacherous Aaron Burr. The account is relentlessly granular, and at times Turnbow produces an amount of detail that’s sometimes more disorienting than edifying. Overall, though, his effort is both original and thrillingly dramatic.
An impressive combination of scrupulous scholarship and powerful storytelling.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-692-19527-7
Page Count: 602
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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