A lively and refreshing memoir.
A politically liberal radio and TV host reflects on his unconventional career path.
Born in 1940, Press (Buyer's Remorse: How Obama Let Progressives Down, 2016, etc.) grew up a strict Catholic in Delaware City. He has happy memories of his childhood and adolescence, but with the benefit of hindsight inflected by progressivism, he observes that life in his hometown was good “as long as you were white.” His first encounter with politics came through his grandfather and father, both of whom served as mayor of their town. Knowing he also wanted a career in public service, Press decided on the priesthood. But after almost a decade studying theology in the U.S. and Europe, he chose to become a “worker priest” rather than a teacher and left for California in 1967. After a few years “protesting the war in Vietnam, counseling runaways in the Haight-Ashbury…and working for Gene McCarthy,” he went to Sacramento to begin his career as a staffer for Democratic state senator Peter Behr. Press then spent the next decade as an environmental activist and then as a key player in Jerry Brown’s 1976 presidential campaign. By 1980, the author had turned his attention to media work, which led to TV and radio jobs at stations in Los Angeles and, later, to the position—as the liberal co-host of CNN’s Crossfire—that brought him to national attention. Throughout the book, the author tends toward frequent name-dropping while expressing an unapologetically leftist perspective that often critiques the current presidential administration. Yet at the same time, he speaks with respect and affection of many of his right-leaning colleagues such as Pat Buchanan, Tucker Carlson, and John McCain. In an age where the debate between left and right has become “ugly and personal” and blighted by negativity, his ability to remain optimistic about politics and disagree with the opposition in a civil manner is a welcome relief.
A lively and refreshing memoir.Pub Date: March 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-14715-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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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