Entertaining and well researched, but less controversial than the publisher’s claims. Wheelan is only one of the recent...
Aaron Burr’s sensational 1807 treason trial makes for good history packed with scandal, courtroom fireworks, and great men behaving badly.
Historians wonder what drove the former vice president to self-destruct. Wheelan (Jefferson’s War, 2003) blames the hostile Chief Executive and makes a reasonable case. Thomas Jefferson picked Burr as running mate in 1800 because he needed to carry New York. A Revolutionary War hero and brilliant lawyer, Burr was a rising, ambitious politician. His positions on slavery and women’s rights were far ahead of his time. He delivered New York, but the election ended in a tie between Burr and Jefferson; in 1800, electors cast two votes but didn’t specify which was for president. The election was thrown into the House of Representatives, dominated by the losing Federalists, whom Burr hoped would prefer him to Jefferson. Yet Wheelan points out that Burr refused overtures from Federalists, while Jefferson made promises that gained their votes. Jefferson then set out to destroy his rival. He denied Burr’s supporters patronage, weakening the vice president’s power base, and chose another running mate in 1804. Trying to recoup, Burr ran for New York governor, but Jefferson worked to ensure his defeat. Popular histories claim Burr’s 1804 duel with Hamilton wrecked his career; Wheelan insists he was ruined before he killed Hamilton. Burr wrote the British government, offering to lead a revolt in the restive states beyond the Appalachians. Getting no response, he eventually organized an expedition that sailed down the Mississippi until Jefferson’s arrest order caught up with him. During the trial, Jefferson peppered the prosecution with advice, some of it illegal and all of it unethical. Unfortunately for Jefferson, Chief Justice John Marshall, a bitter enemy, presided. Marshall’s rulings favored Burr, who was acquitted.
Entertaining and well researched, but less controversial than the publisher’s claims. Wheelan is only one of the recent historians (e.g., Joyce Appleby and John Patrick Diggins) who have begun to separate Jefferson the immortal founding father from Jefferson the man, fiercely ambitious, convinced of his righteousness, and unforgiving of anyone he considered a threat.Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2005
ISBN: 0-7867-1437-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2004
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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