An entertaining look inside the White House.
President Barack Obama’s former deputy chief of staff makes her literary debut in a candid and charming memoir of her unexpected career in government.
Growing up in upstate New York, Mastromonaco, now the chief communications and talent officer at A&E Networks, describes herself as a “good(-ish) student” with no real career aspirations. She majored in French and had a summer internship with Bernie Sanders. After graduating, she worked as a paralegal and then for John Kerry as staff assistant to the press and, during his 2004 presidential campaign, as deputy scheduler, a post she portrays as grueling. “There is no more important commodity than the candidate’s time,” she quickly learned. After Kerry lost, a friend suggested she interview for a job with Obama, who was running for the Senate. Beginning with that campaign, she worked her way up to becoming the youngest deputy chief of staff. As a woman in a male-dominated field, Mastromonaco has been repeatedly asked, “how could someone like you end up in a job like that?” This book, written with the assistance of Broadly contributing editor Oyler, is her answer, addressed to women considering a leap into the demanding, “hierarchical and patriarchal” world of politics. “I think my story can make you all feel less alone, less weird, less anxious, and more confident,” she writes, encouragingly. The workload, she readily admits, is overwhelming: “Everyone thinks that traveling with the president has got to be a sweet gig—lush service, pampering, the nicest meals. It is not.” It requires juggling myriad tasks and being ready to handle any emergency. Her hair turned white from stress. Mastromonaco portrays Obama as kind, smart, focused, and utterly committed to his ideals. Even when he decided to run for president, she writes, he wasn’t “buying into his own hype.” The memoir abounds with intimate glimpses of Washington, D.C., celebrities (Biden, Clinton, Michelle Obama, and scores more) and cheerfully dispensed survival strategies.
An entertaining look inside the White House.Pub Date: March 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4555-8822-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: Jan. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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