A painstakingly researched portrait of the political landscape as the country inched toward civil war.
The second installment of the acclaimed historian and former Clinton adviser’s massive study of Abraham Lincoln delves into his deeply cerebral “wilderness years” out of the political spotlight.
After his one term as Illinois Congressman, Lincoln returned from Washington to Springfield in 1849 to practice law, wondering whether his political days were over. Yet as former Washington Post and New Yorker reporter Blumenthal (A Self-Made Man: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln Vol. I, 1809-1849, 2016, etc.) delineates in this minutely researched biography, Lincoln's political career was entering a latent but potent period, marked by intellectual study and writing and keen observation of alarming political developments such as the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854. Always a Whig in politics until then, the provincial lawyer was angered by the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, largely by the efforts of Illinois Sen. Stephen A. Douglas, in favor of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Blumenthal records the excruciating nuances in the events unfolding during these fraught years, including the surprisingly anti-slavery views of the Mexican War general Zachary Taylor and his equally surprising sudden death by cholera; the landslide presidential victory in 1852 of the young, impressionable Franklin Pierce, successfully manipulated by Douglas and Jefferson Davis, war secretary and “acting president of the United States”; the passing of the old order of Lincoln’s heroes Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and John C. Calhoun; passage of the Fugitive Slave Act; and the collapse of the Whig Party into the new Republican Party. As the author chronicles, all of this conspired to bring Lincoln back into the fray. Blumenthal also reveals the extent of Lincoln’s intellectual study during this time and how he began “shadowing” Douglas in framing his anti-slavery speeches. This period of dormancy would explode with the realignment of the Whig Party by Free Democrats, Free Soilers, and Know Nothings and would climax with the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 (presumably to be covered in Blumenthal’s next installment).
A painstakingly researched portrait of the political landscape as the country inched toward civil war.Pub Date: May 16, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5378-5
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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