A sympathetic but also gimlet-eyed scholar’s look at a towering physical and political presence who learned, to his sorrow,...
Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and the War on Poverty have had mixed but lingering results, mostly positive.
Woods (History/Univ. of Arkansas; Shadow Warrior: William Egan Colby and the CIA, 2013, etc.) is a biographer of Johnson (LBJ: Architect of American Ambition, 2006), and this new text is filled with LBJ’s good, bad, and ugly sides. There’s a conversation, for example, with presidential aide Joseph Califano about Califano’s weakness on a negotiation with Congress that will prompt roars of laughter or groans of disgust. The author argues—and demonstrates with considerable effectiveness—that one current (and popular) view of LBJ’s spate of social legislation as a failure is simply inaccurate. He shows the enduring positive effects of Medicare, Medicaid, and other federal programs that dramatically improved the lives of millions. But Woods also recognizes the failures, many of which were exacerbated by the escalating Vietnam War and its financial demands on the budget. LBJ’s plummeting popularity emasculated his effectiveness with the public and with Congress, on whom he’d demonstrated a profound and powerful sway. Woods also deals with the racial explosions of the mid and late 1960s, riots and violent demonstrations that caused the white backlash still evident today. He writes affectingly about the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, the ensuing urban riots, and the worsening inability of LBJ to exercise his desired amount of control. Through the author’s clear prose, we see the frustrations and feelings of betrayal LBJ felt; he had done his best to try to alleviate poverty, to improve education and civil rights, and to work on issues of housing, discrimination, and health care. Yet the war and the increasing public political polarization—now far worse than in Johnson’s day—eventually crumbled all.
A sympathetic but also gimlet-eyed scholar’s look at a towering physical and political presence who learned, to his sorrow, that good intentions were insufficient.Pub Date: April 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-465-05096-3
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
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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