A top-notch historian brings together recondite research with felicitous prose. An excellent choice for students of...
An acclaimed historian examines the American presidency from 1901 to 2001.
Even though he was uninspiring, William McKinley, assassinated in 1901, was the “creator of the 20th-century presidency,” writes Leuchtenburg (Emeritus, History/Univ. of North Carolina; Herbert Hoover, 2006, etc.), who chronicles the entire presidential gallery across the 20th century. So what made McKinley so modern? Not only was he the first to ride in an automobile, appear in motion pictures, and use the telephone, but he set up a table for reporters to brief them daily and pursued a more imperial executive style in deploying American troops on his own authority. This greatly increased power of the presidency was new, as the country at that point was expanding hugely in terms of industry and population. With the accession of Theodore Roosevelt, the office became the famous “bully pulpit” of a muscular, progressive leader, not afraid to take on big business—e.g., J.P. Morgan’s Northern Securities Company, trustbusted by the Supreme Court in 1904. Woodrow Wilson, with his “stern demeanor and his kinetic energy,” was both revered for his idealism and vilified for the scarring of the World War I years. After the “Wilsonian usurpation,” writes Leuchtenburg, Congress was “in no mood to indulge a strong executive.” The country was content with Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover yet welcomed the activism during the Great Depression of Franklin Roosevelt, a transformative president when he had to become commander in chief of the armed forces, then engaged in “a global struggle against fascism.” What the author conveys so marvelously is the sense of how such seemingly ordinary Americans—e.g., Harry Truman, “a man so transparently unqualified”; Dwight Eisenhower, son of a storekeeper in Abilene, Kansas; the polarizing, paranoid Richard Nixon; good-natured Gerald Ford; peanut farmer Jimmy Carter—could bring majesty to the office.
A top-notch historian brings together recondite research with felicitous prose. An excellent choice for students of 20th-century American history.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-19-517616-2
Page Count: 752
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
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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