Admirers of Warren will find this a welcome exaltation.
“She works on the inside, but she’s never considered herself an insider.” A celebratory biography of the “brand-name populist” who many commentators expect will run for president in 2020.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, writes Felix (Michelle Obama: A Photographic Journey, 2017, etc.), comes by her advocacy for the struggling middle class honestly. Born in Oklahoma, she grew up in a household run by parents who, though they considered themselves middle-class, were just a couple of paychecks away from financial disaster—as happened from time to time. Confronting those realities as a lawyer with substantial training in economics and as a public intellectual committed to conveying her findings so that readers everywhere could understand them, Warren has emerged as a leader of the left wing of the Democratic Party, as well as a senator from Massachusetts, a long journey from her beginnings as a middle-state conservative. Felix writes uncritically and sometimes breezily, addressing her subject as a familiar: “It’s a leap of faith to turn away from the sheltering walls of a university, and Elizabeth thought long and hard before jumping into the political chaos of the Bankruptcy Review Commission.” The book is best understood as a fan’s notes, though the author does a good job of digging evenhandedly into one of the central controversies surrounding Warren, the claim of Native American ancestry that has provided Donald Trump with the ugly slur “Pocahontas.” That controversy well merits the several pages Felix devotes to it, which, as she notes, could not be explained in a media atmosphere “in the business of sound-bite drama, not social analysis.” One can be sure that in the event that Warren declares for the presidency, the matter will be reignited, even as she has moved on to being a persistent—and persisting—critic of the rule of big money in electoral politics.
Admirers of Warren will find this a welcome exaltation.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4926-6528-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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