An unsparing profile of James Forrestal (1892-1949), Secretary of the Navy under Truman, by Hoopes (The Devil and John Foster Dulles, 1973, etc.) and Brinkley (History/Hofstra Univ.). This is a bold, strongly psychological investigation of a man who cut the ties that bind, made a spectacular success and a dangerous marriage (to Vogue writer Josephine Ogden), and took his own life after a dramatic breakdown. Born into a small-town lower- middle-class Irish Catholic family, Forrestal put his background quickly behind him upon entering Princeton—where he was voted ``Most Likely to Succeed'' before dropping out for obscure reasons shortly before graduation. Rather than return home, he took demeaning work for over a year before walking into the office of a Princeton Wall Street acquaintance. His classic Roaring Twenties career made him a millionaire: The authors' comparisons with Gatsby are not far-fetched. Controlled, polite, and mysterious, Forrestal was also respected and liked, an eligible and promiscuous bachelor member of the Wall Street elite, working with the legendary Clarence Dillon on epic deals that made financial history, accepted by old money as well as by celebrities like Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, and Gary Cooper. Meanwhile, his wife, ``Jo,'' turned out to be as stubborn and original as himself, and their open marriage (his womanizing never stopped) was stormy yet successful. Forrestal was a logical inductee to the coming WW II war effort; but while his Washington career eclipsed his Wall Street success, his workaholic life was coming apart. By the time he became Secretary of the Navy, the authors say, his denial of his wife's alcoholism and schizophrenia presaged an abrupt and irreversible collapse, triggered by his dismissal by Truman. A powerful biography—critical but sympathetic—of a driven man whose dark side permeates the narrative. (Thirty-six photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: April 16, 1992
ISBN: 0-394-57761-2
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1992
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
PERSPECTIVES
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