Patriotic musings based on creampuff interviews with some men who were once the most powerful on earth.
Columnist and prolific author Greene (Once Upon a Town, 2002, etc.) sets out to chat with some ex-presidents of the US, not including Bill Clinton. He reaches four out of five.
The journey started two decades ago with the late Richard Nixon in his California lair. The self-absorbed former chief executive asserted to our reporter that he had never seen himself on TV—thus retaining his famous spontaneity, he claimed. Next, Greene spent time with competent, confident Jimmy Carter, often named “the best ex-president.” Mr. and Mrs. Carter were busy with good works and happy to be at home in Georgia. Affable George Bush the Elder, in Chicago on a speaking gig with son Jeb, revealed that in four years as president he never passed through a hotel lobby; he always entered through the kitchens. Erstwhile Grand Rapids football hero Gerald Ford settled in the California desert and even more affable, was fine company too. Indeed, the author found all his interviewees to be quite agreeable. (Greene missed contact with Ronald Reagan before the late great communicator withdrew into the shadows of Alzheimer’s, and the text was obviously completed before his recent death.) What did these members of a very special fraternity have in common other than affability? Secret Service protection and a certain wistfulness, apparently. In his effort to reveal the inner men, Greene asked such posers as: “Did you always wear your suit jacket in the Oval Office?” “Do your closest friends call you ‘Mr. President’?” “How do you buy your shirts?” and “What’s your favorite song?” The answers range from startled inconsequentiality to surprised irrelevance. And yet, the idea of these apparently ordinary men achieving such an extraordinary height seizes the author’s imagination, and ours too. Only in America, truly, can such a fraternity be interviewed in Greene’s content-free way.
Patriotic musings based on creampuff interviews with some men who were once the most powerful on earth.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-5464-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
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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