In an elegantly written survey, Adams, a historian, critically examines the effects on Thomas Jefferson of his period as American minister to Paris during the waning years of the ancien rÇgime. In retrospect, Jefferson's arrival in Paris in 1784 as the representative of the fledgling US may seem inauspicious: The new country was mired in debt, particularly to France, from the recently ended revolution; indeed, America may have seemed little more than a banana republic, barely united under the patchwork Articles of Confederation; and Jefferson, a retiring figure from a rural backwater whose principal authorship of the Declaration of Independence was generally unknown in France, seemed ill-suited to succeed the popular, cosmopolitan Benjamin Franklin as America's representative in the sophisticated French capital. In the event, Adams shows, Jefferson excelled as a diplomat. He succeeded in opening up French markets for American exports, in negotiating payment of the enormous debt to France, and in establishing credibility for the new country, while receiving a peerless education in Europe's Machiavellian politics that stood him in good stead when he became president. Meanwhile, as Adams demonstrates at great length, Jefferson fit well into the aesthetic, intellectual, and scientific circles of Paris. His friendships with leading intellects of the period, like Condorcet and Lavoisier, as well as with great salon leaders like Madame d'Houdetot and Madame Helvetius, broadened his outlook and introduced him to the best of European culture. Adams examines in detail the social aspects of Jefferson's life in Paris and his many close friendships with women. He also suggests that Jefferson developed a taste for French radicalism during his Paris years that led him to support the French Revolution even after the Terror had claimed the lives of close friends. A balanced and well-researched look at Jefferson's life and intellect during a crucial period in his development. (68 illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-300-06903-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1997
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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