Though some consider Blair chilly and staunchly belligerent, her memoir indicates that there’s a soft center there somewhere.
The wife of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair shares her personal and political life in a talkative, entertaining memoir.
Born Cherie Booth to two young British actors, the author’s childhood was somewhat idyllic until her father abandoned the family to cultivate another relationship. Blair offers a breezy take on her youth and upbringing, thus priming readers for the juicy bounty of her adult years with husband Tony and the varied controversies she would spend years buffering. Developing a bright, headstrong personality early on, Blair pursued a law career—though the bar, at that time, was “overwhelmingly masculine”—and blossomed while a pupil barrister in the late ’70s. It was during those lean academic years that she met Tony, a handsome law student with blue eyes that “seemed to see right through me.” A heady romance led to marriage four years later and, eventually, four children. The author hardly minces words when it comes to their relationship: She admits to heavy petting on a double-decker bus and describes her youngest son Leo’s birth in excessive detail. As Blair juggled motherhood and a barrister’s career, her husband’s increasing political involvement in the Labour Party spawned a triumphant campaign for prime minister. During their inaugural term, the Blairs met the Clintons in the first of many pleasurable evenings together (though the Monica Lewinsky scandal put a damper on things), and she cites a pleasurable visit to the Bush ranch years later. The author’s blatant disdain for the news media embarrassingly capped the end of her husband’s last term after she took a final jab at relentless media hounds perpetually perched on their Downing Street doorstep. Throughout the book, Blair’s plucky forthrightness shines through.
Though some consider Blair chilly and staunchly belligerent, her memoir indicates that there’s a soft center there somewhere.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-316-03145-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2008
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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