The narrative is filled with gems if readers are willing to struggle through the disorganization.
The noted American Urban Radio Networks White House Correspondent and CNN analyst focuses on her experiences as a black woman reporter trying to do her job amid the hostile first year of the Trump presidency.
Before Trump entered office, Ryan (At Mama's Knee: Mothers and Race in Black and White, 2016, etc.) covered Republican and Democratic administrations without achieving widespread recognition, reporting mostly for AURN since the late 1990s. Her recognition factor shot up significantly in 2017 due to the combative rhetoric aimed at the author by Trump, his White House press secretaries, and White House staffers, most notably Omarosa Manigault-Newman. After Ryan asked Trump openly about his racism, she became a hero to many citizens (in 2017, she was named Journalist of the Year by the National Association of Black Journalist) and a pariah to others (she has received many death threats from Trump supporters). Regarding her seemingly overnight fame, the author notes that she has conducted herself in the same journalistic manner for two decades but that in an era of “fake news” and “alternative facts,” ideologues think of her as somehow biased against Trump and Republicans. The writing is mostly clear but is slowed by clichéd language—e.g., “throw in the towel.” Each chapter is worthy on its own, yet they are arranged in a puzzling manner. A chapter about health care policy precedes a chapter about Ryan unwillingly becoming the story instead of staying out of the spotlight, and policy-heavy chapters about immigration policy, indifference to historically black colleges, and women in the workplace materialize out of nowhere. Throughout the book, the author clarifies her viewpoint (shared by many) that she respects the office of the presidency but finds Trump and many of his staff members incompetent at best and often mean in petty ways.
The narrative is filled with gems if readers are willing to struggle through the disorganization.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5381-1336-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
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
PERSPECTIVES
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