Hardball host Matthews (Life's a Campaign: What Politics Has Taught Me About Friendship, Rivalry, Reputation, and Success, 2007, etc.) blends tributes and chastisement in this highly personal account of John F. Kennedy’s career.
The author begins with his earliest memory of JFK—his failed 1956 attempt to gain the vice-president spot with Adlai Stevenson. From a Republican family, Matthews gradually moved the other way, and JFK was a major factor. Throughout the narrative, the author combines political biography with personal reflection. Repeatedly, he narrates a key event in JFK’s career (e.g., the Bay of Pigs debacle), and then raises questions about why the president behaved as he did. Matthews praises Kennedy’s heroism during World War II, his determination to excel despite his medical conditions and his recognition of the moral aspects of politics. The excerpt Matthews includes from a JFK civil-rights speech delivered after the crisis at the University of Alabama remains stirring today. The author also lauds JFK for his ability to turn from his strong-willed father, his devotion to old friends, his speaking and debating skills and his resolution in the face of the dire threats issued by the Soviets. Despite his obvious emotional attachment to JFK, Matthews does not neglect his negative character traits. He reminds us that Kennedy was not a devoted husband—not just because of his serial infidelities but also in his casual, even cruel, treatment of his wife—and he questions JFK’s support of Sen. Joseph McCarthy and his appointment of his own brother Robert as Attorney General—“sheer, unadulterated nepotism,” writes the author. Matthews also recognizes that the Kennedy charm lay on a hard foundation of political savvy, even ruthlessness. Matthews’ admiration and gratitude for JFK trump his disapprobation.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-3508-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
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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