An entertaining, enlightening look at an administration that was never dull.
An oral biography of the Barack Obama administration, culled from interviews conducted between May 2016 and October 2017.
Abrams (Die Hard: An Oral History, 2016, etc.) takes snippets from his interviews with all the players in this real-life drama, from the election through the end of the administration. The flowing narrative includes revealing insights from a wide variety of both Democratic and Republican politicians, speechwriters, attorneys, and others, from David Axelrod to the West Wing receptionist. Readers experience the first campaign and the many attendant doubts, starting with the uncertainty about whether Obama could even win the nomination. Success meant the team had to go into overdrive, and that’s what they did, taking on an economic collapse, the fraught stimulus bill, stabilizing the Middle East cease-fire, and a promise from Republicans that they would never compromise and would fight the Democrats on everything. Luckily, Obama had a great team working with him, most of whom would do anything he asked of them. That was a trait that held throughout the administration, as people who were burned out by life in Washington, D.C., took on even more assignments just because the president asked them. The author effectively shows the incredible patience exhibited by the president and the invaluable help proffered by Vice President Joe Biden, whose 30 years of experience in Washington provided that extra push when it was required (often). Unfortunately, Republicans were sworn to a policy of obstructionism and manipulation of the legislative process, and the frustrations of the president and his staff are abundantly clear throughout the narrative. At the beginning of the book, Abrams lists the “participants” and their titles; in the appendix, the author provides a complete listing of all of the staff members during Obama’s terms in office. Though technically “unauthorized,” Abrams put in the work with his dozens of interviews, and he also “received cooperation from the Obama White House, the Obama Foundation, and the postpresidency Office of Barack and Michelle Obama.”
An entertaining, enlightening look at an administration that was never dull.Pub Date: July 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5039-5166-2
Page Count: 500
Publisher: Little A
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
PROFILES
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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