Matthews, the news anchor of the televison show America's Talking, offers an on- target dual portait of rival aspirants for the presidency, both eventually successful in their quest for the prize, both destined to end tragically. Richard M. Nixon and John F. Kennedy, Navy veterans of WW II, were elected as members of the House of Representatives' freshman class of 1946. At first they were friendly rivals: Matthews writes touchingly of their cordial personal relationship as colleagues (often sickly during his Senate career, Kennedy received regular hospital visits from the sympathetic Nixon). Nixon rose first, winning the vice presidency under Dwight Eisenhower (Kennedy cheered Nixon's rise in a personal note to the new vice president) and building a national reputation. The bitter and close-fought campaign of 1960 transformed the relationship between the two men: In the now legendary televised debates, Nixon came off as colorless and tired, while the handsome, relaxed Kennedy impressed viewers with his wit and command of detail. As the author shows, the exchanges between the two rivals, who were never far apart on policy matters, became abusive and personal as Election Day approached. In the end, Nixon lost the popular poll by little more than 100,000 votes. Bitter about alleged ballot theft in Texas, Illinois, and elsewhere, Nixon was convinced for the rest of his life that he'd been ambushed by the Kennedy machine. Nixon was eclipsed during Camelot's thousand days: even after Kennedy's 1963 assassination, he was haunted by the ghosts of Camelot and, more concretely, by the political prospects of Kennedy's brothers. Succumbing to paranoia even after his election to the presidency in 1968, Nixon conducted covert surveillances and smear campaigns against Ted Kennedy, Kennedy family allies, and other political opponents, a propensity that contributed to his eventual downfall and disgrace. Matthews doesn't break new ground, but he draws a striking picture of the destruction of a political friendship and its consequences for the country. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen) (First serial to Vanity Fair and Reader's Digest; author tour)
Pub Date: June 3, 1996
ISBN: 0-684-81030-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1996
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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