A cogent and satisfying primer on the mind of the perspicacious Gallic theorist who discerned a new form of government in...
Essayist Epstein (Friendship, 2006, etc.) presents his take on America’s most quoted, least vexing Frenchman in this latest addition to the Eminent Lives series.
In 1831, 26-year-old Count Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville, aristocratic in blood and mien, sailed to the new United States on a voyage of discovery. In less than a year, Tocqueville and his friend Beaumont traveled from Niagara to Nashville, Boston to Pittsburgh, studying America’s penal system. The visitors met an emergent middle class, venal politicians, doomed Native Americans, the humble and the eminent. They saw a central government and a federation of states joined in a new form of government. What Tocqueville discovered was equality. Back home, not yet 30, he embarked on his masterwork, Democracy in America. The two-volume work, published in 1835 and 1840, was a sociological prototype and a triumph of political thought. Epstein provides samples of its frequently prescient analysis. A democratic people, Tocqueville noted, would always find two things difficult: “to start a war and to finish it.” Were despotism to gain a foothold in democratic nations, he remarked, “it would be more extensive and more mild, and it would degrade men without tormenting them.” Expressed in lucid, remarkably nimble prose, his political philosophy has been accessed by liberals and conservatives, democrats and gentry. As Epstein reminds us, Tocqueville’s causes were always liberty and human dignity. Though he served as a deputy in the government of Louis-Philippe, he witnessed and reported with measured sympathy on the upheavals of 1848. The Old Regime was published in three years before his death in 1859, but he never completed his assessment of the French Revolution or Napoleon.
A cogent and satisfying primer on the mind of the perspicacious Gallic theorist who discerned a new form of government in America.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-059898-0
Page Count: 208
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 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
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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