Personal reflections meet large-scale history, most satisfyingly.
A slender volume on that most unslender of subjects, Winston Churchill.
Memoirist, historian, journalist, soldier, traveler and leader, Churchill committed millions of words to print and generated millions more by other hands. Indeed, writes prolific historian Johnson (Heroes: From Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar to Churchill and de Gaulle, 2007, etc.), “I calculate his total of words in print, including published speeches, to be between 8 and 10 million words.” So slim a treatment of the portly prose master would seem unusual, but Johnson seemingly has a purpose in mind—to use Churchill’s life as a kind of self-improvement scheme for the rest of us, who have not the opportunity to go steaming off to Gallipoli or escape from the Boers. The author measures Churchill’s successes on a broad beam—whence his observation that while Churchill drank like a sailor on shore leave for most of his life, “his liver, inspected after his death, was found to be as perfect as a young child’s.” Johnson approvingly notes Churchill’s habit of casting about widely for learned opinion but keeping his own counsel, making difficult decisions and accepting responsibility for failures as well as successes. Johnson presents a fully rounded character who used the F-word from time to time, though never to Nixonian excess, who learned as he went and who managed to retain principle while acting as a practical politician. The author closes with a list of ten big lessons that Churchill can teach, some very specific (use airpower whenever possible) and some more applicable to ordinary lives (work hard, forge alliances, get your priorities straight).
Personal reflections meet large-scale history, most satisfyingly.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-670-02105-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2009
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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