A timely biography presenting a valuable counterbalance to the current enthusiasm for Hamilton.
Feldman (Law/Harvard Univ.; Cool War: The Future of Global Competition, 2013, etc.) returns with a substantial biography of our fourth president.
The title's "three lives" refer to distinct phases in the career of James Madison (1751-1836). He appears first as the primary architect of the Constitution at the Philadelphia convention in 1787 and a major proponent of its ratification, accomplishments which alone would have cemented his place in history. There followed a bleak period leading the opposition in the House of Representatives during the Federalist ascendancy in the 1790s. Finally, Madison returned to executive power as Thomas Jefferson's secretary of state and then as president. Introverted and bookish, Madison was inclined to grand political theories and a naïve expectation that people and nations would act rationally. He crafted a political system intended to accommodate the clash of disagreement while maintaining personal amity, and he went to great lengths to maintain friendships with his opponents. Ironically, he nevertheless became a leading partisan in a system he had designed to render parties unnecessary, and he began the unfortunate practice of labeling policies he disagreed with as unconstitutional, leading to breaks with former friends George Washington and Alexander Hamilton. Feldman's scholarly yet accessible account emphasizes the evolution of Madison's views on the Constitution and his hard-earned flexibility as well as the maturation of his viewpoints and skills as he learned to adapt pure theories of government to political realities and then to make public virtues of the practical necessities. The richly detailed narrative, while occasionally lacking fire, is suitable for general readers; Feldman's presentation of Madison's adventures when the British burned the capital in 1814 is particularly rousing. The author skates over some setbacks and controversial decisions, like the rejection of a British armistice offer early in the War of 1812, and makes a brave job of harmonizing Madison's lifelong devotion to personal liberty with his status as a slaveholder.
A timely biography presenting a valuable counterbalance to the current enthusiasm for Hamilton.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9275-5
Page Count: 800
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 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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