Preaching to the choir? Yes, but it’s a sermon that seemingly requires constant reiteration.
A depressingly cogent litany of the current president’s unbelievably spectacular failures.
Following his recent memoir, From the Left, longtime journalist Press, host of an eponymous show and former host of Crossfire, lays into Donald Trump and the “chaos and corruption [that] have become our new normal.” To be sure, the author could have likely extended this book out another couple hundred reasons, but the portrait on offer here is ugly enough as it is. Divided into sections such as “Trump’s Disastrous Acts as President,” “Trump Fans the Flames of Racism,” and “Trump’s Impeachable Offenses,” the book is a solid resource for the millions of Americans attempting to keep track of the near-daily lies and half-baked Twitter tirades. Press ably limns his subject’s myriad faults—pathological lying (“whatever demonstrable falsehood bubbles up to the surface of his brain is always, for him, the right thing to say at that moment”), laziness, racism, sexism, rampant xenophobia, obsession with Hillary Clinton, addiction to Fox News, inability to understand even the most basic elements of governance—and unprecedented attacks on some of the most important institutions in the U.S., including health care, the media, an open internet, and the social safety net. The author also delves into “Trump’s Cabinet of Thieves,” a who’s who of corruption and incompetence: They’re all here, from Scott Pruitt to Ryan Zinke to Rick Perry to Betsy DeVos. Trump devotees and hard-right Republicans will no doubt find fault with the book—or not read it—but Press is beyond reproach in his research and documentation. And as for that single reason for Trump to stay? You guessed it: Vice President Mike Pence, who “would be even more dangerous” as president. As the author writes, “he’s even more conservative than Trump—former GOP congressional staffer Mike Lofgren calls him ‘as far right as you could go without falling off the earth”—and a lot more effective.”
Preaching to the choir? Yes, but it’s a sermon that seemingly requires constant reiteration.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-30647-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2018
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
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
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