Comic relief—and lots of useful tips—from a journalist with a side hustle as a county official.
A fresh and funny memoir by a progressive wife, mother, and writer/editor who ran for local office for the first time in middle age—and won—on a shoestring budget.
After the 2016 presidential election, Martini (Sweater Quest: My Year of Knitting Dangerously, 2010, etc.) channeled her rage into knitting pink pussyhats for the #Resist movement from her home in Oneonta, New York. When that didn’t banish her anger, she asked a locally active Democrat how else she might help, and he urged her to run against the Republican incumbent for the District 12 seat on the Otsego County Board of Representatives. As a political newbie, Martini was skeptical, but she signed on after learning that she could keep out-of-pocket costs low (“in the hundreds, not…thousands” of dollars) and continue to work for the alumni magazine for SUNY Oneonta. Local officials’ decisions, she realized, could affect people’s daily lives more than state or federal politics: “North Korea is important,” but it won’t matter “if everyone in your neighborhood has rabies because the county Board of Health has no money.” In this entertaining memoir, the author describes the highs and lows of her successful campaign and first two years of representing a rural area with about 800 voters in a “deep, deep red” county. She also chronicles her interviews with officials in other states, including Liz Walters, a member of the Summit County (Ohio) Council, who warned the author, “you go in expecting The West Wing. What you really get is a combination of Parks and Recreation and Veep.” With self-deprecating wit, Martini recalls the victories of the Otsego board, such as getting smartphones for social services workers who, until 2017, used “county-issued flip phones,” and problems like the “dark money” that floods even into small-town races. She doesn’t sugarcoat the challenges, from five-hour meetings to family time lost to doorbell-ringing, but she frequently offers strategies for meeting them, and her overall message is hopeful: Democracy works—at least at the local level.
Comic relief—and lots of useful tips—from a journalist with a side hustle as a county official.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-24763-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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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