American Caesar, no less: from the title onward, Manchester has produced a biography of MacArthur so grandiose and so singleminded as to satisfy even the giant ego of its subject. But this "great thundering paradox," "the best of men and the worst of men," is not without his manifold, if more life-size, fascinations. He was, ineluctably, his father's son: at 18, Arthur MacArthur dashed up Missionary Ridge to plant the Union flag and win the battle—and later, his insubordination as military governor of the Philippines cost him his pest and his career. Young MacArthur learned everything from his father, it appears ("It's the orders you disobey that make you famous," he said in World War I), except what his paranoia perhaps did not permit him to learn; how to escape his father's fate. But then Manchester, constantly tolling the knell of doom, would not have his tragic Greek hero to range alongside his Napoleon (the favorite comparison) or, more aptly, his Winfield Scott. He has, however, assembled massive evidence of how the MacArthur legend grew, cannily nurtured by its subject and persistently mocked to his detriment. Splashing ashore at Leyte, he was caught by a photographer scowling—not in "steely determination," as the public thought, but in outrage at the naval officer who hadn't directed his landing craft to a dock. Thereafter he deliberately waded ashore for cameramen, and incurred the scorn of troops who had already pegged him—with only a little justification—as "Dugout Doug." Also manifest throughout is the political streak that led him to mix inappropriately in civilian affairs—as contrasted with the more politically astute Eisenhower and so well understood by FDR, who alone emerges as more than MacArthur's match. What Manchester does not pursue are the personal threads (an infatuated first marriage to a "flapper," the escape to anonymity of over-cherished son Arthur); what he does not amplify is the history (the Japanese occupation is particularly oversimplified and blurred). And all his elaboration of the circumstances leading up to MacArthur's dismissal, however extenuating in some particulars, does not alter the standard textbook interpretation of that event. He has documented the legend, filled in the image; what is still wanted is a considered portrayal of the good/bad soldier as only the author sees him.
Pub Date: Sept. 30, 1978
ISBN: 0316544981
Page Count: 815
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1978
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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