Metro Newspapers senior correspondent and Huffington Post contributor Dunn adds to the growing shelf of Sarah Palin books.
Unfortunately, the author doesn't convincingly substantiate his statement that Palin’s “ambition is as unbridled as it is morally corrupt.” Too much of the book is simply a retread of familiar stories from the 2008 news cycle, embellished with gossipy details about how, as a kid, the former Alaskan governor enlisted her 8th-grade friends in intrigues against a rival, as well as innuendos about her parents’ and her own marriage. By loading the narrative with such trivia, Dunn downplays Palin's more significant lies—e.g., about her husband's membership in the separatist Alaska Independence Party. However, the author effectively dismisses her ordinary-soccer-mom cover story, demonstrating that she has been an ambitious career politician since 1992, when she was first elected to the Wasilla city council; and that she has depended upon a growing base of support from conservative, evangelical Christians. Dunn documents her reprisals against political opponents of her campaign to censor library books when she was mayor, her abuse of power as governor in a personal vendetta against her brother-in-law and her overall lackluster performance as governor. More tantalizing is the author’s account of a meeting in the summer of 2007, between Palin and a group of neoconservative pundits and politicians, including New York Times columnist William Kristol, who became the point-man for the Palin-for-VP campaign. Whether she will be a serious contender in 2012 is questionable, but as a political celebrity she has made a soft landing as a political consultant on Fox News and on the international speakers circuit, where she joins notables such as Bill Clinton at $100,000 per engagement. A fundamentally dull book, likely of more interest to Palin publicists than to serious readers.
Pub Date: May 10, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-312-60186-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2011
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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