An admiring biography of a neglected figure in America's mid- 20th-century rise to global ascendancy. A scholarly study of the extraordinary career of David K.E. Bruce (18981977) would be welcome. Lankford, regrettably, has chosen to write a celebratory, one-dimensional study. A good storyteller, the author ladles out admiration for each of the privileged worlds that young Bruce inhabited: Born into the landed gentry of segregated Virginia, growing up in Gilded Age Baltimore, graduating from Princeton. As an officer in the postWW I army, Bruce developed a taste for the glories of war, sampled at a safe distance from any action. After marrying Ailsa Mellon, one of the wealthiest women in the world, Bruce became a confidant and art adviser to his father-in-law Andrew Mellon, one of the wealthiest men in the world. Lankford's greatest enthusiasm is reserved for Bruce's central role in building up the new postWW II American empire, based on free trade, global military interventionism, and a worldwide covert operations network. Like so many other Cold War power brokers, Bruce began a diplomatic career through his friendship with William ``Wild Bill'' Donovan, the founder of the OSS (later the CIA). Contacts in the intelligence community led to diplomatic appointments, including stints as ambassador to France and Britain, and a special mission to China. ``Tall, erect, gray- templed, distinguished in appearence, he was the model image of an ambassador,'' Lankford asserts. And his aristocratic indifference to the common people served him well in the rarefied world of old- boy networks in the intelligence and diplomatic communities. Bruce might have been, in his personal tastes and demeanor, the last American aristocrat (or at least the last to act as if governing was his by right), but he is far from being the last privileged American to step effortlessly from inherited wealth to immense political power.
Pub Date: Aug. 19, 1996
ISBN: 0-316-51501-9
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1996
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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