Roosevelt never fails to fascinate, and Morris provides a highly readable, strong finish to his decades-long marathon.
With appropriate crescendo and coda, the concluding volume of the author’s sweeping biography of Theodore Roosevelt, following The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (1979) and Theodore Rex (2001).
Morris opens this account of the last decade of Roosevelt’s life in 1909, when, just out of office, TR was somewhat at a loss about to what to do. He had, after all, been a model for the “strenuous life” he recommended, commanding soldiers and sending imperial fleets off to impress American power on the world. He had written books and countless articles, some, uncomfortably, equating birth control with “race suicide”—one reason, suggests the author, that the New Left of the 1960s considered him “a bully, warmonger, and ‘overt racist.’ ” He had served two terms as president but decided not to go after a third, even though, in those days, he could have served forever. With no particular place to go, TR headed out on safari to Africa, shooting nearly everything he saw. Then he traveled the world, returning to America just in time to fall into often-bitter feuding with his successor, William Howard Taft. As Morris writes, TR transformed into a reforming leftist, “with enough administrative and legislative proposals to keep the federal government busy for two decades,” while Taft and Democratic challenger Woodrow Wilson occupied places to the right. When Wilson took office, TR became one of his sternest critics, likening him in one renowned speech to Pontius Pilate. Yet, writes Morris, even his admirers found reason to think the one-time master of the bully pulpit a mere bully. The Colonel—for so he insisted on being called—did not end his days well. Presciently, he foresaw his decline almost exactly when it occurred, a sad disintegration into a melancholic and inactive ill health. However, as the author notes at the end of his fluent narrative, for all the criticism of TR in his day and after, he has risen to the top tier of presidents, and is increasingly seen as a friend deemed him: “a fulfiller of good intentions.”
Roosevelt never fails to fascinate, and Morris provides a highly readable, strong finish to his decades-long marathon.Pub Date: Nov. 23, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-375-50487-7
Page Count: 768
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2010
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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