Though necessarily biased, this is a highly thoughtful, thorough exploration of the grindingly slow workings of national...
A member of the Barack Obama administration reviews his eight years with the president with a mixture of pride and regret.
Rhodes, whose official title was Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communication, was 29 and working at a Washington, D.C., think tank when he joined Obama's campaign team and then his administration. During that time, he was with Obama almost daily and wrote numerous speeches for the president, including the Nobel Peace Prize speech in which Obama spoke of the gap between “the world as it is” and “the world as it ought to be.” It's the former that takes center stage here, as Rhodes, in brief but information-packed chapters, describes the ways in which idealism—his more than the pragmatic president's—is ground down by the reality of deeply stubborn governments and institutions. Moving chronologically through Obama's two terms, the author clearly describes the president's responses to crises around the world, including those in Egypt, Syria, and Libya, and his own role in shaping Obama's response to a host of critical issues. Frustrated with playing only the role of mouthpiece, Rhodes began to take a larger role in shaping the relationships between the United States and nations like Cuba and Burma as the years went on, while still “wrestl[ing] with the concern that I was losing myself inside the experience, transformed into a cipher for the needs of this other person, who was, after all, a politician, playing the role of U.S. President.” Though he reveals a few details about Obama, including his affection for Nicorette gum and Scrabble and his occasional indulgence in anger directed at those working most closely with him, this is no tell-all. The narrative is a serious, even somber, inside look at the forces at work inside—and outside—a presidency.
Though necessarily biased, this is a highly thoughtful, thorough exploration of the grindingly slow workings of national security and the inevitable compromises of government.Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-50935-6
Page Count: 484
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 25, 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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
