A flawed but deeply personal recounting of one woman’s rise through the political ranks.
A comprehensive autobiography by the first female U.S. senator from Minnesota.
For anyone interested in the intricate details of how a young girl from Minneapolis made it to a seat in the Senate, Klobuchar (Uncovering the Dome, 1986) has written that book. Humorous at times, honest, and meticulously detailed, occasionally to a fault, the author unveils her entire life’s history with a slow, steady pace. She chronicles her grandparents’ immigrant status, her father’s rise through journalism and his troubles with alcohol, her mother’s years as a teacher and stay-at-home mom, her parents’ divorce, and how these events affected her early childhood. She discusses her school years, beginning with kindergarten, and takes readers up through high school, college, and law school. Once this preliminary history is out of the way, Klobuchar tackles her years in the law business, and she discusses a variety of cases she worked on with her colleagues. She also recounts her marriage to husband John and the birth and early health issues of her daughter, Abigail. She then moves into her political run for county attorney, which eventually led to her years as senator. Throughout the book, Klobuchar provides a wealth of daily minutiae—e.g., the day she was babysitting and hid a half-eaten bologna sandwich under the couch, that her wedding dress was a “sample,” and the sparring she encountered over moving some furniture in the county attorney’s office reception area. These facts add quaintness to the narrative but also bog it down. Still, Klobuchar provides an informative chronicle balanced between her personal and political lives, one that reflects the stance she took early in life to overcome any obstacles thrown her way and how she has used that same drive to surmount the numerous obstructions she has faced while serving as senator.
A flawed but deeply personal recounting of one woman’s rise through the political ranks.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62779-417-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
SEEN & HEARD
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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