A legal scholar, Rosen sympathizes with Taft’s strict constitutionalism more than many readers will, but he makes a...
A perceptive biography of William Howard Taft (1857-1930).
Serving from 1909 to 1913, Taft was never the most admired president, but he was an intelligent man dogged by strict principles and a lack of political acumen. So argues Atlantic contributing editor Rosen (Law/George Washington Univ.; Louis D. Brandeis: American Prophet, 2016), the CEO of the National Constitution Center, who does not conceal his admiration, describing him as a likable figure who preferred the law to politics. An excellent solicitor general and federal judge, he became a popular figure after William McKinley appointed him governor of the Philippines in 1900 where he proved a superb administrator. Already a friend, Theodore Roosevelt appointed him Secretary of War in 1903, and he became the president’s right-hand man, troubleshooter, and chosen successor. Roosevelt was not aware that Taft, who loved the law above all, believed that a president must never exercise powers beyond those specifically granted by the Constitution. Within a year of taking office, when Taft made this clear and fired Roosevelt’s more activist officials, the former president took bitter offense. Rosen emphasizes that Taft shared Roosevelt’s progressive views on conservation and trust-busting and sometimes went far beyond (he favored a world court). Sadly, Roosevelt’s hostility and Congress’ delight at a president they could safely ignore made his administration a painful experience. When Roosevelt announced his candidacy for the 1912 Republican nomination, he remained America’s most popular figure, but party leaders, immune to his charm, engineered Taft’s renomination. Roosevelt ran anyway, and Taft finished a poor third in a three-way race, but the story had a happy ending when President Warren Harding appointed him Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in 1921 where he did an outstanding job.
A legal scholar, Rosen sympathizes with Taft’s strict constitutionalism more than many readers will, but he makes a convincing case that he was a conscientious president who did his best.Pub Date: March 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8050-6954-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2018
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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