Moore will probably not change minds about the Iron Lady, but readers inclined to be as fair-minded as he will find much of...
British historian/writer Moore delivers the second volume in his authorized biography of the pioneering—and divisive—prime minister.
As this volume opens, Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013) is riding high on the British victory over Argentina in the Falklands and the consolidation of power that it enabled. Inclined ever to go it alone, Thatcher abolished the policy group surrounding her, one that labored ceaselessly to keep the Conservative message strong while avoiding any overt impression of ideological purity, “which, if leaked, could cause such mayhem.” But leaked it was: whether dealing with Irish nationalists, striking coal miners, or a recalcitrant European Community, Thatcher was steely and bent on uncompromising success, evidenced by her “angry will” and unwillingness to make coalitions. The real world does not often work that way, of course, and in the few places where Moore’s narrative bogs down, it is in the details of bureaucracy that so maddened Thatcher—e.g., the matter of getting a budget passed. The author is surprisingly evenhanded: as he notes, Thatcher, like Ronald Reagan, seemed thoroughly uninterested in self-reflection, and some of the best writing in the book concerns the solid wall of cultural resistance that built up in the U.K., fueled by punk rock and Red Wedge–ish theater and writing. Stephen Frears, for instance, noted that his 1987 film Sammy and Rosie Get Laid was intended “to bring the government down.” Of course, if Thatcher was ever bothered by the negative depictions, she seldom let on. Moore closes by chronicling how she closed out 1987 with a stunningly comprehensive electoral victory. “No prime minister in the era of universal suffrage had ever won a third consecutive term before,” he carefully writes, though no thanks were due to Thatcher’s “extreme anxiety, ill tempers, and misjudgments in the campaign.”
Moore will probably not change minds about the Iron Lady, but readers inclined to be as fair-minded as he will find much of interest in his account of her years in power.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-307-95896-9
Page Count: 880
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
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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