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
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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