Occasionally distracting footnotes aside, an admiring treatment of Kissinger and an intriguing examination of the fraught...
Inquisitive look at a year in the life of Henry Kissinger, who said, “I was the glue that held it together in 1973—and I’m not being boastful.”
After a landslide reelection for Richard Nixon and a U.S. foreign policy that seemed on the verge of peace with honor in Vietnam and an open dialogue with China, 1973 was eventually marked by the Yom Kippur War and Watergate. In addition to providing colorful portraits of the international figures that played Kissinger’s foils—Leonid Brezhnev, Golda Meir, Anwar Sadat—historian Horne (To Lose a Battle: France 1940, 2007, etc.) follows the statesman month by frantic month in his dealings with China, Vietnam, the Soviet Union, Chile, Europe and the Middle East. During the year in which Kissinger won a Nobel Prize and became Secretary of State, Nixon’s precipitous decline loomed over everything, which was vividly reflected during the Yom Kippur War. Horne grippingly recounts those tense days of international negotiation, all the more dramatic due to the psychological withdrawal of the president. The dynamic between Nixon and Kissinger, so different in personality and background, propels the narrative. The author writes perceptively of the strange bond between the two men—one marked by “a certain extraordinary insecurity” but also by a shared political vision and a conspiratorial secrecy. In a relationship that Kissinger characterized as “ambivalent, compounded of aloofness and respect, of distrust and admiration,” Horne provocatively wonders if “Nixon’s self-destruction…made Kissinger.”
Occasionally distracting footnotes aside, an admiring treatment of Kissinger and an intriguing examination of the fraught Nixon/Kissinger relationship.Pub Date: June 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-7432-7283-4
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2009
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
