by William J. Cooper ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 24, 2017
A thorough but not groundbreaking biographical investigation.
A biography focused on a statesman’s career during a period of profound political change.
With at least five books about John Quincy Adams (1767-1848) published in the last five years, it’s difficult to accept the idea that Adams has been “lost” to history. Among those books were two comprehensive biographies by Fred Kaplan and James Traub, an examination of Adams’ education, and a perceptive biography of his wife, Louisa, in which, of course, Adams himself was an omnipresent character. Cooper (Emeritus, History/Louisiana State Univ.; Jefferson Davis and the Civil War Era, 2008, etc.) distinguishes his biography by focusing on “the context of the developing forces and changing values taking place in American politics during his lifetime,” which Adams “both embraced and resisted.” With this aim, the author pays little attention to his subject’s marriage (Louisa, portrayed as sickly, is pushed to the background) or family (the death—possibly suicide—of his dissolute son George, for example, is dispatched in a paragraph). Like other biographers, Cooper portrays Adams as stubborn, ambitious, and a “patrician intellectual” who disdained calling public attention to himself—even by campaigning for office—and was happiest keeping his voluminous diaries. After a career as a statesman, he acceded to the presidency but, like his father, was not re-elected to a second term. He watched with dismay the rise of Andrew Jackson, whom he considered corrupt, ignorant, and opposed to the “energetic federal government” that Adams championed. Jackson’s election, Cooper asserts, “signaled the beginning of a popular politics buttressed by organized, vigorous political parties.” The author astutely traces Adams’ connection to two rising factions, the Antimasons and Whigs, and, as a congressman, his efforts to halt slavery, which he believed could be accomplished through “a gradual, ordered process.” He struggled with his alignment with abolitionists, fearing that their cause might “ruin him politically,” but he eventually concluded that slavery would not be purged from the Union “until it goes down in blood.”
A thorough but not groundbreaking biographical investigation.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-87140-435-0
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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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