Not especially newsworthy, but perhaps of some interest to news junkies and students of the media. (16 pp. b&w photos,...
Behind-the-scenes glimpses of how the news is made, but nothing that hasn’t been said before.
Schieffer, the folksy Texan perhaps best known for his longstanding role as moderator of Face the Nation, apparently has a Forrest Gump–like ability to be on the spot of breaking news. Then a hometown reporter, he was sidelined by the political columnists when JFK arrived in Dallas in November 1963. He slept in on the morning of the 22nd, but when he heard the news that the president had been shot, “grabbed my black felt, snap-brim Dick Tracy hat and roared off in my two-seater Triumph TR-4 sports car” to the office, where he answered the phone, found himself talking to Lee Harvey Oswald’s estranged mother, and snagged an exclusive interview. Soon thereafter, he was in Mississippi tracking the civil-rights movement and dodging bullets fired by white-supremacist snipers; from there it was on to the big time, only to face in battle, many years later, the cost-cutting, news-hating suits at CBS, who saw to it that “producer Sandy Socolow’s old adage that ‘no one ever got fired for spending too much to cover the news’ was no longer operative.” Schieffer outlasted them and went on to chair Face the Nation, where he booked poets as well as pundits, scholars as well as scandalmongers. Telling us all this, he doesn’t deliver much he couldn’t say on TV, subtitle notwithstanding, except to get in a couple of zingers at the expense of the brass, recall the room-clearing eructations of Texas cops, and reveal that George McGovern once told a heckler to kiss his ass during the ’72 campaign. There’s not much bang for the buck here, and Schieffer’s tendency to dumb it down (“liberals who favor gun control . . . welcome the endless debate over guns because it is a proven way to raise money from their supporters”) is a constant distraction.
Not especially newsworthy, but perhaps of some interest to news junkies and students of the media. (16 pp. b&w photos, not seen)Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-399-14971-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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