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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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