Though not without bland tropes of its own (“God never abandoned me on my journey,” etc.), Brazile’s insider account will...
Al Gore’s presidential campaign manager explains what went wrong.
Among other topics, that is, including the long struggle for voters’ rights in longtime Democratic operative Brazile’s native Deep South: racism prevailed in the ’60s, racism prevailed in Florida in 2000. While working to make Gore president, Brazile writes, she remarked to a Washington Post reporter, “As a Black woman, I was the most invisible person on the planet. And I told her, ‘I’m in the White boys’ world now and I’ve got to beat them just to get a seat at the table, but I’m ready for them.’ ” Which, of course, led to wounded cries of reverse racism on the part of offended white politicos, who dug up graveyards full of dirt on Brazile: her having been fired from the Dukakis campaign in 1988 (“I had ended up flying all over the country with Dukakis just so he could avoid having an all-White campaign,” she grumbles) and her involvement with gay-rights organizations. “Race is the third rail of American politics,” she observes, theoretically off-limits until, as if by magic, it becomes an issue—usually, the author suggests, thanks to Republican machinations. (“Whenever Republicans go down in the polls, they unleash the most horrific personal attacks on a candidate.”) Not that the Dems are faultless, she notes: to her anger, Gore refused to accept the possibility, at least publicly, that racism had a role in the disenfranchisement of black voters in Florida, which contributed to his losing the election. And, Brazile hints, not that Gore was any great shakes; after the race he abandoned leadership of the Democratic National Committee, putting it back into the hands of the Clintons and shunting her aside in favor of Terry McAuliffe “without consulting the Black leadership.” In other words, politics as usual.
Though not without bland tropes of its own (“God never abandoned me on my journey,” etc.), Brazile’s insider account will appeal to wonks, activists, and reformers.Pub Date: June 4, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-5398-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2004
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
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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