History that remains solidly relevant today, and a real eye-opener for anyone who thinks that fierce debates over tax...
A biography of populist politician William Jennings Bryan that demonstrates that progressive evangelicalism is nothing new.
Kazin (History/Georgetown; The Populist Persuasion, 1995, etc.) summarizes in just one chapter Bryan’s first 30 years: birth in 1860, Illinois childhood, study of law, marriage to Mary Elizabeth Baird. The biographer’s real interest lies in Bryan’s public career, jumping quickly into Bryan’s move to Nebraska and subsequent terms in Congress, beginning in 1890. The author argues that his subject was the first politician to envision a government that, through its expansive powers, could do great things for ordinary people. (Well, some ordinary people: Bryan’s concern extended only to white folks.) His populism sprang from his Christianity, and if his “progressive interpretation of the Gospels” never got him elected to the White House (he ran for president three times), it did earn him the enthusiastic devotion of tens of thousands of Americans. A gifted orator, Bryan frequently lectured on tariffs and the gold standard. Later, he took up the causes of anti-imperialism, prohibition and women’s suffrage; as Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of State, he was a strong advocate of peace. Americans today, however, remember him mostly as the diehard opponent of evolution depicted in the popular play Inherit The Wind. Kazin revisits the well-known scene from the 1925 Scopes trial, in which Bryan, lawyer for the prosecution, actually took the stand as a witness and wilted under Clarence Darrow’s sharp-tongued questions about biblical literalism. (Bryan died six days later.) But Kazin also usefully contextualizes Bryan’s hostility toward the theory of evolution: In addition to believing that it “opened the door wide to immoral behavior,” he worried about the slippery slope from Darwinism to eugenics.
History that remains solidly relevant today, and a real eye-opener for anyone who thinks that fierce debates over tax reform, corporate power, imperialism and evolution are recent developments in American politics and culture.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2006
ISBN: 0-375-41135-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2006
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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