In her latest of a series of studies of formidable women, Felsenthal (Alice Roosevelt Longworth, 1988, etc.) profiles the longtime Washington Post and Newsweek publisher, often called ``the most powerful woman in the world.'' As the now-retired Graham writes her memoirs, she will surely feel aggrieved by this massive, often unsparing biography. A journalistic diamond in the rough, the book is far too long, sometimes bland, and without analysis of the Post's strengths or shortcomings. But Felsenthal has found the devil in the details. She has gotten scores of people to spill the beans on her subject, including many male editors who, sometimes because of their own sexism, were unceremoniously sacked by this unmerry widow. (``God must have loved Newsweek editors,'' cracked one victim. ``He made so many of them.'') Dozens of incidents reveal Graham in the worst moments of her infinite variety: capricious, snobbish, and, when necessary, ruthless (her crushing of the rival Washington Star and of her own paper's union helped her roll up huge profits in the 1980's). Yet, astonishingly enough for a woman born into privilege as the daughter of financier-publisher Eugene Meyer, Graham also wins admiration here for her attempt to overcome the effects of her turbulent family life. Humiliated by both her pretentious mother and her charismatic but manic-depressive husband Phil Graham, she wasn't prepared to assume control of the Post and Newsweek after the latter's suicide in 1963. But despite her lingering insecurity, Graham invariably made the right decision when the chips were down- -in entrusting the Post to editor Ben Bradlee, in publishing The Pentagon Papers, and in risking the Nixon Administration's wrath with her paper's Watergate coverage. She ended her career as the only female head of a Fortune 500 company. Skin-deep on the Post's influence—yet compulsively fascinating on the woman who constantly surprised the men who underestimated her. (Photos—16 pp. b&w—not seen.)
Pub Date: Feb. 3, 1993
ISBN: 0-399-13732-7
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
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
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