Forced to leave ABC News in 1998 because he was working on this tendentious book, Zelnick (Backfire: A Reporter’s Look at Affirmative Action, 1996) hacks away at Vice President Albert Gore Jr. After a brief prologue that suggests Gore’s loyalty to President Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal will hurt his presidential hopes, Zelnick proceeds with a traditional chronological journey through his subject’s life. Although he credits Gore for a variety of accomplishments and personal virtues, the author has come to bury the vice president, not to praise him. Zelnick gleefully repeats every damaging anecdote and allegation: in high school, Gore was twice ejected from football games for unsportsmanlike conduct; in college he smoked marijuana; in Congress, he flip-flopped on tobacco and abortion issues; as vice president he abused the campaign finance laws. At times abandoning all pretense of objectivity, Zelnick labels Gore a “pious moralist,” “Orwellian,” and “self-aggrandizing”; he claims his subject “sold out the interests of the environmentalists,” “purged” from government positions anyone who didn’t agree with him (there’s an entire chapter devoted to this), and wrote a book about environmental issues (Earth in the Balance, 1994) that is “simplistic” and “utterly brainless.” He even suggests that Gore might have done something to prevent the Y2K computer crisis. But when Zelnick accuses Gore of exploiting for political gain the most painful of family tragedies (the death of his sister from smoking-related lung cancer; the severe injuries sustained by his son in an accident), he reveals a core of heartless cynicism that will appeal only to the most zealously partisan readers. This sawed-off-shotgun style does occasionally hit the mark; Zelnick’s account of the 1996 presidential campaign’s fund- raising excesses is troubling, even though it targets only Democrats. A hatchet job that would elicit a smile of admiration from Lizzie Borden.
Pub Date: May 3, 1999
ISBN: 0-89526-326-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1999
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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