A thorough, well-written, and surprising picture of a man who was much more than a “do-nothing” president.
New insight into Dwight Eisenhower’s silent methods of facing down enemies, particularly Joseph McCarthy.
Eisenhower expert Nichols (Eisenhower 1956: The President’s Year of Crisis—Suez and the Brink of War, 2012, etc.) clearly explains his strategic deceptions and ability to use others to enact his orders. Regarding McCarthy, one of his most effective ploys was to never speak his name. Acknowledging McCarthy’s love of attention, Eisenhower knew that ignoring him would work. As chairman of the Senate Government Operations Committee, featuring control of the permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, McCarthy used his position in his fervent search for those who might subvert American values. He was an impulsive loose cannon, rarely planning his denunciations. Feeding his mania was his chief counsel, Roy Cohn, whose main objective was to keep his chief consultant, David Schine, close to him and out of trouble. When Schine was drafted, Cohn immediately began pushing to get special privileges for Schine, using the clout of McCarthy’s name. When that failed, Cohn swore to “get” the Army, setting the McCarthy committee on its road to ruin. He effectively conducted one-senator hearings, abused senatorial privilege, and, in one particular incident, insulted a highly decorated general—the last straw for Eisenhower. He had his officials prepare a dossier on Cohn and Schine, releasing it just after Edward R. Murrow’s scathing See It Now episode. The Army-McCarthy hearings were the result, ultimately signaling the end of McCarthy’s reign of terror. Nichols has studied Eisenhower diligently and fully understands his subtle methods, especially his ability to never lower himself to McCarthy’s level. He actively promoted his style as the golfing president, and he had the Machiavellian method down pat, never making himself personally responsible for what became the answers to his problems.
A thorough, well-written, and surprising picture of a man who was much more than a “do-nothing” president.Pub Date: March 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4516-8660-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 25, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2017
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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