A distinguished historian’s fascinating WASP roots narrative that excels as family saga, revisionist American history, and inquiry into what we can possibly know about the past. In addition to sharing a family tree with the US President James K., famed journalist George, Wilson era diplomat Frank, and WWII General James, the author’s relatives have taken bows on every stage of American history, and can be traced all the way back to the 15th-century lowland Scotsman John Maxwell de Pollok, whose holdings included a small pond (—pollok— in Gaelic) south of Glasgow. Instead of wallowing in his ancestors’ triumphs, Polk (History/University of Chicago; Passing Brave, 1973, etc.) considers the sparse, misleading, and frequently apocryphal evidence that remains, and then works such evidence into the larger American scene. When documentation fails to disclose much about the 17th-century immigration of Protestant Scottish mercenary Robert Pollock to Lord Baltimore’s Catholic New World land grant colony on the Chesapeake Bay, Polk goes for the fun facts, offering miniature monographs on Indian relations (which were very good, at first), the inadequacies of the Scottish axe, the curious lack of dinner forks, and the grim hardships attending a failed tobacco plantation that—now a wildlife refuge—justly earned the sobriquet Polk’s Folly. We hear of inglorious Indian trader relatives, and nasty colonists who nearly doomed Washington’s Continental Army (with which Polk family members wintered at Valley Forge) with bad provisions, desertions, and betrayals to the British. Gathering momentum in discussing the 19th-century perils of James, a Union calvary officer imprisoned during the Civil War who later gunned down one of Judge Roy Bean’s corrupt cohorts, the chronicle soars into the 20th century with gripping accounts of the notorious Zimmerman telegram and Patton’s tank battles, concluding with the murder of journalist James. Brilliant historical narrative that celebrates, in family members and the nation as a whole, an abundance of heroism, tragedy, guts, and glory.
Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2000
ISBN: 0-385-49150-6
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1999
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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
PERSPECTIVES
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