A revelatory history of America’s grasp for power.
A lively exploration of how “intervene first, ask questions later” became America’s foreign policy beginning with the Spanish-American War.
In 1898, Cuba’s fight for independence from Spain captured the American imagination, inflamed by sensational newspaper reports and dispatches by well-regarded journalists. Many believed that Cuban rebels were starving, perishing on America’s doorstep, and it was the responsibility of the U.S. to intervene “in the name of humanity.” Although President William McKinley and his administration were reluctant to interfere, others pressed for war, the noisiest among them Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt’s views prevailed, and his name and fortune became forever linked to a volunteer regiment known as the Rough Riders, whose exploits fed into America’s self-image of courage and invincibility. Drawing on letters, archival sources, and abundant newspaper articles—many from on-site journalists including Richard Harding Davis, Stephen Crane, and Frank Norris—Risen (Single Malt: A Guide to the Whiskies of Scotland, 2018, etc.), deputy op-ed editor at the New York Times, offers a penetrating history of the “half-baked, poorly executed, unnecessary conflict” from which the U.S., nevertheless, emerged victorious. Due to the nation’s limited army and ill-prepared state militias, the war relied on volunteers; many eagerly joined Roosevelt’s “cowboys,” which took its nickname from one of Buffalo Bill Cody’s touring troupes. The Rough Riders were shocked by the reality of Army life: Malodorous cattle ships, refitted to transport troops, teemed with insects; on the island, they lacked food, water, cooking utensils, supplies, medicine—and decisive leadership; malaria, typhoid, and yellow fever raged. Moreover, Cubans were resentful, seeking guns, money, and ammunition—not America’s “rescue.” Although the intervention lasted less than six months, America battled on for another four years, in the end controlling Puerto Rico and part of the Philippines. The war, Risen argues convincingly, shaped the nation’s sense of unity, purpose, and role as an exporter of American values, establishing “the wheels of myth-making, idealism, and national self-interest that would guide the country during the twentieth century.”
A revelatory history of America’s grasp for power.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-4399-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
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
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
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