Twenty years and countless upheavals later, Manchester has set out unblinkingly to revive Camelot: from the initial invocation of Malory to the photos captioned "The Perfect Couple" to the concluding thoughts on the historical Arthur and the heroic Jack Kennedy. This is a book, moreover, that people will either love or hate—written in the elegiac, buddy-buddy mode of Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye and, as regards Manchester himself, in the second person. For Jack and Jackie's wedding, for instance, "you were billeted with Wilmarth 'Lefty' Lewis, the Waipole scholar who, having married an Auchincloss, was Jackie's step-uncle." Apropos of Jackie's Francophile influence on Jack's wardrobe: "Probably Jackie was also responsible for those presidential harangues about your shirts, which, he insisted, were not only unstylish but appeared to be soiled; didn't you change them at least four times daily?" Anecdotes also feature the likes of Red Fay, a.k.a. The Redhead and Grand Old Lovable (as in "Grand Old Lovable watched his friend give himself an injection"). On the personality, the family, politics, the presidency, you've read it all before—back when. (With time have come some jabs at the "liberal intellectual community.") In the large, there's both plain truth ("His greatest triumph. . . was his resolution of the Cuban missile crisis") and sheer glorification ("his most appealing legacy lies in his compassion"). But all the old photos are here, along with a few new ones, in a capacious album that does indeed make the Kennedy days look glamorous again.
Pub Date: Nov. 4, 1983
ISBN: 0316545112
Page Count: 280
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1983
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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