While it’s fascinating to watch Clinton’s infamous powers of seduction (and equally infamous need for toadies and...
A professor’s seduction by President Clinton.
Liberal thinker Barber (Political Science/Rutgers; Jihad v. McWorld, 1995, etc.) obviously wanted to write a memoir about his experiences in the Clinton White House. He had one problem: He wasn’t a member of the Clinton White House. His solution was to try to spin attendance at a couple of White House schmooze fests for academics into an investigation of the impact Big Ideas had on the administration. It doesn’t quite work, especially because he barely addresses ideas other than those he himself has written about. More importantly, his connection to the White House was simply too tenuous to sustain his account. When he writes simply as an analyst, it’s to great effect, as when he convincingly argues that Clinton’s inability to secure a legacy can be attributed to the fact that the president never provided the American people with an overarching political ideology to accompany the administration’s laundry lists of popular policies. Unfortunately, most of what’s here consists instead of the tedious recounting of presentations by liberal academics. Barber’s half-conscious, slightly creepy obsession with Clinton (he self-mockingly calls it an affair) gives the impression that he was a bit of a delusional stalker: canned compliments left him shuddering with joy, he read fate into seating arrangements, and imagined rivals were sniped at with adolescent aplomb. When presidential aides asked for brainstorming ideas, Barber prepared full speeches—then got miffed when they didn’t emerge from the president’s mouth on television. His unsolicited campaign to run the National Endowment for the Humanities reduced him to pathetic actions worthy of a Philip Roth protagonist—one only wishes Barber had Roth’s comic gifts.
While it’s fascinating to watch Clinton’s infamous powers of seduction (and equally infamous need for toadies and hangers-on) in action, it still doesn’t justify a work for which the material simply isn’t there.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-393-02014-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2001
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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