Gordon-Reed incorporates views by Johnson’s other biographers to create a fleshed-out, many-sided portrait.
A fair-minded, toned-down portrait of a deeply problematic president who could not rise to the country’s challenge after the Civil War.
While Abraham Lincoln is often considered our greatest president, the man who inherited the post after his assassination is often voted the worst. In this succinct study typical of the publisher’s informative, tidily composed series, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Gordon-Reed (History and Law/Harvard Univ.; The Hemingses of Monticello) carefully walks through the conflicts of Andrew Johnson’s career, culminating in his near impeachment in 1868. What compelled Johnson to block all measures of Reconstruction in the South and rehabilitate the very Southern planters and slave-owners who had earlier wrecked the Union? The author considers the measure of Johnson’s character, forged in the years of his family’s poverty after the early death of his father in Raleigh, N.C. Forced by his mother’s reduced circumstances into apprenticeship to a tailor, Johnson escaped and eventually set up shop as a tailor in Greenville, Tenn., married and grew somewhat prosperous, despite the lack of any formal education. It was during those early years, when he had “brushed up close to the nightmare of dependency and social degradation,” a state shared by the enslaved African Americans at the time, that Johnson developed his obsession with the wrongs of the poor whites at the hands of the planter class—and at the expense of blacks. A fiery debater, Johnson duly acceded to positions of alderman, mayor, congressman, governor and senator as a Tennessee Democrat. A staunch Unionist (despite his pro-slavery stance) and proponent of the Homestead Act, Johnson also made a lot of enemies. His ability to serve as a military governor (appointed by Lincoln) to a state in rebellion from the Union underscored his character’s ample contradictions, foretelling the executive trials ahead.
Gordon-Reed incorporates views by Johnson’s other biographers to create a fleshed-out, many-sided portrait.Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-6948-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Dec. 30, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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