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CUSTER'S TRIALS

A LIFE ON THE FRONTIER OF A NEW AMERICA

Stiles digs deep to deliver genuine insight into a man who never adapted to modernity. The author confirms, but perhaps...

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Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Stiles (The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt, 2009, etc.) gives a warts-and-all portrait of Gen. George Armstrong Custer (1839-1876), giving full rein to both his admirers and critics.

Custer graduated at the bottom of his West Point class in 1861 with the most demerits of any of the students. Only the demerits foreshadowed the brilliant tactician’s future. In the first half of the book, the author provides an excellent chronicle of Civil War battles and the politics of war. Custer’s undisputed prowess as a cavalry officer in the war fed his ambitions. He gained a place on George McClellan’s staff that would prove especially deleterious. His flamboyance, velvet uniform, and slouching hat might have made him a laughingstock, but his ability was real and his courage, sincere. His knowledge of tactics and ability to read his environment gained him promotions and celebrity. He led from the front, but he was incapable of management. His postwar assignments in Texas and Kansas brought out the cruel, tyrannical man who abused and humiliated his men. His published writings chronicle his fascination with natural history, but they provided little income. He dabbled in the railroads and a silver mine venture, and he gambled on stock speculation. Stiles ably points out his many defining flaws: his heroic style didn’t work in an era of tact and skill, and there is no doubt that he was self-serving, generally assuming that rules weren’t made for him and never showing remorse. In addition to examining Custer’s life, the author also introduces his cook, the fascinating Eliza Brown, an escaped slave who deserves a biography of her own.

Stiles digs deep to deliver genuine insight into a man who never adapted to modernity. The author confirms, but perhaps excuses, the worldview of the “boy general with the golden locks.”

Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-307-59264-4

Page Count: 592

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: July 7, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015

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WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...

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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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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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