Gives meaning to the phrase "a heartbeat away," especially when applied to an official who could possibly ascend to the...
The former vice president shares a detailed history of his heart attacks, alternating sections with the doctor who has supervised the surgeries to keep him alive despite multiple near-death experiences.
Cheney (In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir, 2011) experienced his first heart attack in 1978. During his varied career in politics—as a representative, secretary of defense, chief of staff and vice president—Cheney’s bosses and associates generally knew about his weak heart, as did attentive members of the general citizenry. Perhaps, however, few understood how often the balky heart kept Cheney on the sidelines or slowed his performance. Reiner (Medicine/George Washington Univ.) inherited Cheney as a patient from a retiring doctor. The two men formed a close bond as repeated heart attacks, suspected attacks and the resulting fallout in compromised health forced them into proximity. Cheney rarely examines his partisan politics within the text, and Reiner eschews politics completely. Instead, they lean toward the teaching mode, hoping readers will grasp the importance of preventive medical care and appreciate the vast progress made in recent decades in the field of heart surgery. For the most part, the patient and the doctor explain themselves clearly and strike the appropriate didactic tone. At times, the details from Cheney range from self-indulgent to tiresome, and it’s unlikely that Democratic readers will pay any attention to this book. For the most part, however, Cheney’s survival instincts come across as admirable, whether he is admired or despised by readers for his political decision-making. Also open to question: whether President George W. Bush and his advisers should have asked Cheney to serve as vice president for eight years knowing his health history and possible future dangers.
Gives meaning to the phrase "a heartbeat away," especially when applied to an official who could possibly ascend to the highest office in the land.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4767-2539-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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