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ADAMS VS. JEFFERSON

THE TUMULTUOUS ELECTION OF 1800

A well-written look at the enigmatic politics and personalities of the early Republic.

For those still pondering the presidential election of 2000, and looking that of 2004 in the eye, comes this knotty tale from the days of the Founders.

“Politicians then, as now, were driven by personal ambition,” writes Revolutionary-era historian Ferling (Setting the World Ablaze, 2000, etc.). “They used the same tactics as today, sometimes taking the high road, but often traveling the low road, which led them to ridicule and even smear their foes, to search for scandal in the behavior of their adversaries, and to play on raw emotions.” In 1800, for instance, Federalists branded Republican candidate Thomas Jefferson “a howling atheist,” while Republicans questioned Federalist candidate John Adams’s war record; so hot did the battle grow that propagandists even turned on their own candidates, as did Alexander Hamilton when, for reasons that are still murky, he published a vicious attack on Adams, “upon whom he heaped all the blame for the erosion of his political fortunes.” Hamilton may have had reason to be ticked off, for the trusted aide of George Washington and Revolutionary War hero found no place on the Federalist ticket, pushed aside in favor of the democracy-loathing Charles Pinckney, of whom “no one ever claimed that his was a charismatic persona.” Jefferson and fellow Republican Aaron Burr (who, Virginia Republicans divined, “was not passionately committed to any political principle”) handily won the electoral race against Jefferson’s one-time friend Adams (they broke, Ferling writes, over a misinterpreted inscription in a copy of The Rights of Man). But Jefferson had also to win in Congress, where the race was much closer. Ferling argues that he did so by brokering a deal with the Federalists, an arrangement that would explain why, “despite having fought against the Hamiltonian system for nearly a decade, Jefferson acquiesced to it once in office” and made other concessions to his political enemies. Whereas in Jefferson’s Second Revolution (see above), Susan Dunn takes a benign view of whatever the arrangement amounted to, Ferling is clearly uncomfortable with the back-room dealing. Otherwise, the two authors complement each other nicely.

A well-written look at the enigmatic politics and personalities of the early Republic.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2004

ISBN: 0-19-516771-6

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Oxford Univ.

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004

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WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...

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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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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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