Colorful, well-written and nuanced.
Randall (History/Champlain Coll.; Alexander Hamilton: A Life, 2003, etc.) delves beneath the myth to fashion the definitive biography of the frontier hero and founder of Vermont.
Best known for leading his paramilitary Green Mountain Boys on a daring attack on British-held Fort Ticonderoga, at Lake Champlain, on May 10, 1775—the first American action in the Revolutionary War—the charismatic Allen was a Connecticut-born farmer, businessman and politician who would become an American folk hero. Self-educated, foul-mouthed and over six feet tall (unusual for the time), he was celebrated for his legendary physical prowess. He could lift a bushel bag full of salt with his teeth and throw it over his head, the stories said. “He was a Paul Bunyan before Bunyan ever existed,” writes Randall. When Allen first moved to Vermont in 1770, the territory was claimed by both the colonies of New Hampshire and New York. Determined to see Vermont become part of New England, where he owned land, Allen and his militia waged a five-year campaign of intimidation to drive away New York settlers. This same rag-tag band of Vermont farmers and hunters took Ticonderoga, without the Continental Congress’s approval, shortly after hostilities began at Lexington and Concord. Randall’s authoritative, vivid book is especially good on Allen’s nearly three-year imprisonment after his failed attack on Montreal in 1775. Harshly treated, first in England and then in New York, he was finally released in a prisoner exchange. He then served Vermont as commander of the militia, chief diplomat to the Continental Congress and advisor to the governor. “The war hero, the counselor of state, he became the public face of Vermont, inside and outside the republic,” writes the author. Allen’s prison memoir was a bestseller during the Revolutionary era.
Colorful, well-written and nuanced.Pub Date: June 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-393-07665-3
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2011
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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