An eye-opening look at the personal politics behind the present administration.
A revealing biography of the man the sitting president calls “Fredo,” and who once insisted, “My job is to make sure we don’t make the same mistakes made by previous administrations.”
George W. Bush has long relied for legal counsel on fellow Texan Alberto Gonzales. Picked from a pool of candidates by Harriet Miers, Gonzales was, writes Austin-based journalist Minutaglio, every bit the token minority member, someone to point to as a Republican born without a silver spoon; what is more, as a partner in a major Houston firm, Gonzales took a substantial pay cut to go into government. Known more as a workhorse than a brilliant legal mind—though, brilliantly, he long managed to hush up Bush’s drunk-driving conviction and other indelicacies—Gonzales has been one of the loyal if undistinguished soldiers the president is said to favor; he has backed Bush up on his spree of executions of retarded prisoners in Texas and written policies that defend and even authorize the torture of suspected al-Qaeda members, though his most concentrated project on becoming White House counsel was to put together a “heavily detailed, multiappendix, 160-page-guide” detailing the condition of Clinton staffers’ offices when the Bush team moved in, festooned with signs reading “VP’s cardiac unit” and with posters of a faked Time magazine cover bearing the headline, “We’re Fucked.” “We think it unlikely that a reader would attribute the message in question to members of the incoming Administration,” he noted for the benefit of the General Accounting Office, the recipient of the report. Gonzales is apparently not well-liked inside the Beltway, shunned by hardcore conservatives as much as civil libertarians and particularly by military officers saddled with carrying out his tribunals, but he has not yet suffered the fate, metaphorical or real, of his Godfather nickname-sake. Bush apparently adores him, and indeed he may still be in the running for a Supreme Court seat.
An eye-opening look at the personal politics behind the present administration.Pub Date: July 3, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-111920-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Rayo/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2006
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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