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
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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