A trenchant deconstruction of much-ballyhooed revelations (in Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover, by Anthony Summers, 1993) that longtime FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was gay—plus an analysis of Hoover's policies toward sex and crime. Theoharis (History/Marquette Univ., The Boss: J. Edgar Hoover and the Great American Inquisition, not reviewed) scores Summers's ``mind-boggling,'' simplistic account of Hoover's ``compromised directorship,'' in which he allegedly suffered Mafia blackmail and pursued politicians' sexual peccadillos out of his own hypocrisy. If Summers is right, asks the author, why haven't former FBI agents or attorneys general come forward to corroborate such charges? Theoharis, who doubts that Hoover was gay, believes the ``wily and cautious'' bureaucrat would never have let himself be compromised; he also finds several weaknesses in the account of Summers's best source, Susan Rosenstiel (wife of a liquor magnate), who said she had seen Hoover in drag at gay orgies. Hoover, the author argues, exploited the ``moralistic concern about personal conduct'' that pervaded the country when he took office in the 1920s. He collected dirt on numerous politicians and public figures, gay and straight, but usually used such information cautiously, relying on Congress and the press rather than blackmail and direct publicity. Hoover seized on WW IIera concerns about fascism and communism to further build the FBI. This politically popular concentration on fighting subversives, Theoharis contends, damaged the FBI's capacity to fight organized crime: ``From 1936 Hoover for the most part abandoned law enforcement.'' Hoover survived, the author concludes, because his politics matched those of our political elite. Only after Hoover died in 1972 did the FBI turn to organized crime, needing to recapture public opinion after embarrassing revelations about its extralegal methods. Students of history and policy should pay heed.
Pub Date: March 10, 1995
ISBN: 1-56663-071-1
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Ivan Dee/Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1995
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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