Amid the stream of JFK books to be released for the centennial, this work should emerge as one of the most complete and...
Smith (Sloan School of Management/MIT), John F. Kennedy’s nephew, and Brinkley (History/Rice Univ.; Rightful Heritage: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Land of America, 2016, etc.) assemble a large collection of material by and about the late president.
Coinciding with the centennial of JFK’s birth, May 29, this volume presents speeches and accompanying commentaries from a wide range of public figures. The book is organized chronologically, briefly covering JFK’s early years, the senatorial period, 1960 presidential campaign, each of the three years in the White House, and finally his legacy. The famous speeches are included: the inaugural address, the televised update on the Cuban missile crisis, the vision for space exploration set forth at Rice University, the Ich bin ein Berliner speech, and the civil rights report of 1963. Less-well-known speeches also are here, including JFK’s address to the New York Liberal Party, entitled “Definition of a Liberal,” and the role of the artist in American society, delivered at Amherst College shortly before his death. The speeches are well-written, often elegant. They usually exuded optimism and provided a tutorial on the issues and offered solutions on the most important national challenges. Many are as timely today as they were more than a half-century ago. Enhancing these primary sources are analyses from such diverse analysts as presidential historians Robert Dallek and Michael Beschloss, politicians Elizabeth Warren and John McCain, and entertainers Dick Cavett and Robert Redford. The book is an unabashed celebration of JFK, but the speeches stand alone, and the commentary is insightful. The editors have assembled hundreds of complementary photos, most of them uncommon, enhancing the overall presentation, and the book is packed with other notable contributors, including George Packer, Norman Mailer, Dave Eggers, Joseph Ellis, Samantha Power, and Gloria Steinem.
Amid the stream of JFK books to be released for the centennial, this work should emerge as one of the most complete and useful.Pub Date: May 2, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-266884-4
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
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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