A fairly straightforward, rueful memoir in which the author achieves frank self-acceptance.
The son of recently deceased Sargent Shriver and Eunice Kennedy Shriver reflects on his father’s towering achievements.
Being the son of JFK’s right arm who first organized and led the Peace Corps, orchestrated LBJ’s War on Poverty and ran for president in 1976, Shriver struggled mightily his whole life under the shadow of a benevolent, famous father, portrayed here as nearly saintly in his Catholic faith and sense of humanitarian mission. A native of Westminster, Md., the elder Shriver served in World War II, attended Yale and started his law career in Chicago. He became a junior editor at Newsweek, where a felicitous contact with Joe Kennedy got him hired to run Kennedy’s Merchandise Mart in Chicago; he eventually married Kennedy’s daughter, Eunice. Jack Kennedy and Sargent Shriver had known each other back at the Canterbury School, and Shriver was soon enlisted to aid Kennedy’s campaigns and garner the talent for Kennedy’s “best and brightest” Cabinet. A peacemaker, statesman, friend of the Church and head of the Special Olympics (founded by Eunice Kennedy), “Sarge” was a hard act to follow. His slipping into Alzheimer’s during his last years strained the relationship between father and son, who was serving in the Maryland legislature and ultimately lost his 2002 race for Congress, yet also transformed and deepened the son’s appreciation of his father’s accomplishments and his own shortcomings. Keeping up with the Kennedys is a major theme in the book, since the Shriver clan spent the holidays at Hyannis Port with the slew of Kennedy relatives and cousins.
A fairly straightforward, rueful memoir in which the author achieves frank self-acceptance.Pub Date: June 5, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9530-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: March 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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