For the general reader, a fair introduction to two towering personalities and to the 20th-century landscape before it turned...
How Britain’s playboy king and America’s cowboy president forged the modern Anglo-American partnership.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the great powers of Europe scrambled to form new alliances to advance their imperial ambitions. France and Britain formed the Entente Cordiale, “a loose arrangement…settling a wide range of controversies that had plagued relations between them for years.” A genuine player in world affairs for the first time, the United States abandoned its antagonism to the British Empire and embraced an alliance among the English-speaking peoples. Fromkin (International Relations, History, Law/Boston Univ.; Europe’s Last Summer: Who Started the Great War in 1914?, 2004, etc.) acknowledges that this rearrangement of the world’s diplomatic furniture was an almost predictable response to the threat posed by Germany’s unstable Kaiser Wilhelm to the traditional European balance of power. Further, the author concedes that neither Theodore Roosevelt nor Edward VII were entirely in control of their nations’ foreign policies and that, in any event, forces much larger than individual personalities shaped events. Still, yoking the two men as “secret partners” gives Fromkin sufficient excuse to throw bouquets at two successful, in many ways unlikely, leaders about whom many of their countrymen remained deeply skeptical. Through his mother Queen Victoria, “Bertie” was literally the uncle of all Europe, known primarily for his love of pleasure, France, fashion and women. Famously a cowboy and Rough Rider, the bellicose Roosevelt became, following McKinley’s assassination, America’s youngest president. Fromkin’s profiles explain the origins of each man’s public image, but also demonstrate that Roosevelt was more than “a mannerless savage,” Edward more than “a mindless playboy,” caricatures dear to their contemporaries perhaps, but long since dismissed by historians. How the global aspirations of each happily intersected at the 1906 Algeciras Conference serves as the narrative climax, but too much is merely asserted for the thesis to be entirely persuasive.
For the general reader, a fair introduction to two towering personalities and to the 20th-century landscape before it turned toxic.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59420-187-5
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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