An adept blend of legal, political and business journalism about the man who would be New York’s next governor.
A balanced biography from Washington Post reporter Masters of New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, called “Crusader of the Year” by Time in 2002 and a headline-hunting bully who is frequently the target of Wall Street Journal editorials.
Spitzer, like one of his reformer heroes, Theodore Roosevelt, comes from a privileged background yet has earned a reputation as a foe of corrupt financiers. Masters traces the swift ascent of this current Democratic candidate for governor of New York: exclusive Bronx prep school, Princeton, Harvard Law, marriage and family, service in the Manhattan D.A.’s office and runs for the Attorney General’s office (the second try, a squeaker in 1998, put him in office). But most of the book is taken up with Spitzer’s high-profile battles against gun manufacturers, Midwestern power plants, Wall Street research analysts such as Henry Blodgett and Jack Grubman, insurance companies and mutual funds. His inspirations include the Progressive movement of the last century and, more surprisingly, conservatives’ “new federalism,” enabling state officials to move into areas long associated with the federal government. Interviewing associates and adversaries of the politician, Masters recounts the maneuvering behind his public actions: round-the-clock pushes for indictments, innovative use of forgotten legislation, clashes with corporate counsels and leaks of ongoing investigations. Spitzer emerges as a Dewey or Giuliani in Democratic clothing: intelligent, energetic, but also self-righteous and prickly. Although Masters credits Spitzer with standing up for small investors at a time when the federal government laxly enforced regulation of Wall Street, she also finds some substance in conservative laments that he sparked a host of other states’ lawsuits, plaguing companies with competing investigations, paperwork and costs in the millions. That complaint is coupled with another from the liberal side: By favoring the first people to cooperate with his office, Spitzer has sometimes allowed powerful targets to walk away largely unscathed while smaller fries were penalized.
An adept blend of legal, political and business journalism about the man who would be New York’s next governor.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-8050-7961-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2006
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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