More personalities than arms arcana, infused by a deep reverence for his man.
Effectively focused, vividly adept portraits of two newsmakers at the pinnacles of their relevance on the world stage.
Not only was he present at the Reykjavik summit in October 1986, in the role of director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Adelman (Shakespeare in Charge: The Bard's Guide to Leading and Succeeding on the Business Stage, 1999, etc.) has taught Shakespeare and knows a thing or two about drama, character and leadership. He is convincing in his argument that the Iceland weekend of arms control maneuvering between the two superpower chiefs—Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, who was perched precariously atop the geriatric Soviet dictatorship and desperate to enact reform—had enormous repercussions, namely the beginning of the dismantling of the Soviet state. Indeed, both leaders sorely needed to score a coup during this one-on-one weekend. The gathering was supposed to be low-key, with few advisers, but Gorbachev brought along more than 300 officials and his educated, elegant wife, Raisa. The Soviet leader badly needed to rein in Soviet spending on nuclear armaments to keep up with the West—e.g., countering Reagan’s much vaunted Strategic Defense Initiative—since the Soviet Union, sprawled across satellite minions, was simply broke. Reagan, for his part, emerges in Adelman’s heartfelt yet witty portrait as more in touch than his advisers. However, SDI, or “Star Wars,” proved the sticking point to an agreement between the two mostly willing partners: Gorbachev was terrified of it, Reagan agreed naively to share it, while the truth was that it didn’t even exist. Yet the weekend, involving the warm, open conversing between the two once-icy contingents, would change everyone, “humanize officials” and bring the much-needed Cold War thaw.
More personalities than arms arcana, infused by a deep reverence for his man.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-231019-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Broadside Books/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2014
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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