A self-aggrandizing, self-righteous attempt by the blustery New York senator to explain his vision of the American political sceneat least as it applies to the life and times of Senator Alfonse D'Amato. The world according to New York's Republican senator is very simple. Just about every political move that D'Amato makes is correct. Just about every political move that his opponents make is incorrect. Virtually every politician who has run against him, D'Amato says, is wrong on nearly all the issues. Virtually all of his political opponentsincluding the late New York Republican senator Jacob Javits, former Democratic representative Elizabeth Holtzman, former Ralph Nader associate Mark Green, and former New York State attorney general Robert Abramsran unfair, viciously deceitful campaigns against him. D'Amato's black-and-white world also includes an enemies list made up primarily of the ``liberal establishment'' (also known as ``self-righteous liberal do- gooders'') along with the ``liberal press'' (also called ``the establishment press''). In the world according to Alfonse, the senator is always right; the press is disingenuous at best, dishonest at worst. The senator's press enemies list is topped by D'Amato's hometown newspaper, Newsday. That newspaper's coverage of his 1992 senatorial campaign, the senator says, was ``blatantly biased and hostile.'' D'Amato also has harshly critical things to say about Newsweek, the New York Timeswhich, he claims, ``goes to all sorts of lengths to appear sensitive to every `politically correct' group or lifestyle''the Village Voice, and CBS's Sixty Minutes. D'Amato credits Kevin McDonough with helping him ``compile'' his book. The senator, however, takes full author credit. That might explain why the writing is artless at best, mired in clichÇs, filled with amateurish exclamation points, and marred by several grammatical errors. For dyed-in-the-wool conservative Republican fans of Senator Alfonse D'Amato only. (16 pages photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Aug. 18, 1995
ISBN: 0-7868-6045-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
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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