A politician driven by self-interest? The very thought in the matter of the master of Monticello tells us that we live in...
A lucid, gently critical view of the great president and empire-builder and most literate of politicians.
Barring the discovery of a trove of unknown documents, it’s unlikely that anyone will soon find anything new to say on the matter of Thomas Jefferson, and Hitchens (Love, Poverty, and War, 2004, etc.) ventures no discoveries. Yet he has a pleasing way of juxtaposing the known facts with a more nuanced view of his subject than the portraits offered by critics such as David McCullough and worshippers such as Dumas Malone. At the outset, for instance, Hitchens recalls the well-worn datum that Jefferson died on the very same day as his long-time rival John Adams, the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence; Hitchens adds a nice note to the discussion, though, by citing a letter Jefferson had written only days earlier, in which he thundered, “The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.” It complicates matters, Hitchens allows, that the “author of America” ignored a fifth of the population when making such pronouncements, though he well recognized the depravity of slavery, and that the same brilliant radical did his best to ensure that the lands of the Louisiana Purchase would be open to the slave trade—and that the minds of Southerners would not be tainted by schools that taught abolitionist “anti-Missourism.” On many such controversial matters, Hitchens decides, Jefferson was motivated by what he thought to be the better interests of the Republic, though “in a smaller number, it is not difficult to read the promptings of personal self-interest.”
A politician driven by self-interest? The very thought in the matter of the master of Monticello tells us that we live in revisionist times. Hitchens’s slender study complements several lives of Jefferson while displacing none, and it’s well worth reading.Pub Date: June 2, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-059896-4
Page Count: 160
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
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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