Not problem-free, but worthy, ambitious, and of much interest to students of recent US history.
A sprawling, unwieldy, yet readable life of the fallen president.
O’Brien (History Emeritus/Univ. of Wisconsin) professes to have spent more than ten years on this book, and there’s no reason to doubt him: he cites just about every study and incidental work in the literature, and his own massive contribution sometimes slows to a real-time crawl as he describes key events in Kennedy’s presidency. Indeed, the author tends to give perhaps too much consideration to gainsaying theories, such as the politically edged charge that JFK was no hero as the commander of PT-109. O’Brien tosses that charge about for a few pages before noting what he might have more simply written: the men aboard the doomed swift boat considered their skipper to be a hero, so what more do we need? But plenty of people had it in for Kennedy all his life, the author hints. Early on, for instance, the FBI seems to have taken considerable interest in his love life, believing that a Danish bedfellow of his was a Nazi spy; an official dossier was just one price JFK had to pay for his lifelong philandering. Yet O’Brien seems reluctant to do more than mention matters that have exercised other writers, such as the illegal origins of the Kennedy family fortune and its patriarch’s links to organized crime, not to mention his antediluvian political ideas. (O’Brien does write, however, that Joseph Kennedy got into much hot water at the beginning of WWII for remarking that “Democracy is finished in England. It may be here.”) The best portions chronicle JFK’s abbreviated presidency, showing how he allowed himself to be manipulated on the matter of Vietnam while gaining more solid knowledge of Cuba and the Soviet Union, and how the president, a sharp student of economics, tried to work magic with tax cuts that flew in the face of a wartime deficit, a condition that will seem familiar to readers today.
Not problem-free, but worthy, ambitious, and of much interest to students of recent US history.Pub Date: March 15, 2005
ISBN: 0-312-28129-3
Page Count: 1064
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2004
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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