Washington's most eminent lawyer, adviser, and confidant of Presidents offers a brilliant, entertaining, and generous (736- page) memoir of life at the pinnacle of power. Clifford began life as an attorney in Missouri, becoming during WW II the naval aide to President Truman. Quickly, he assumed a dominant role in the Truman White House and became Truman's principal adviser on domestic and foreign policy. Here, his admiration for Truman is obvious, and his many anecdotes about his plain-spoken chief are delightful. Moreover, Clifford became primary architect of many of Truman's most splendid accomplishmentshis triumphs over the steel and coal unions, the National Security Act, the desegregation of the Armed Forces, and Truman's magnificent 1948 electoral victory of Dewey. Soon after that victory, Clifford retired to become a private lawyer in Washington. He remained influential with many prominent people in government, however, and his narrative of Washington in the Fifties is fascinating. A self-proclaimed ``liberal activist,'' he later had a powerful impact on the policies of the Kennedy Administration. Similarly, he became personally involved with the formation of policy in the Johnson Administration. Despite early opposition to the Vietnam War, Clifford publicly supported the President's policies, eventually becoming LBJ's secretary of defense. His excruciating narrative of the Vietnam tragedy fills the reader with regret that LBJ did not follow Clifford's wise counsel. Finally, Clifford briefly reviews the achievements and shortcomings of Presidents in the post-Johnson era. His analysis of Richard Nixon's downfall and of the very dissimilar imperfections of Jimmy Carter's leadership are particularly illuminating. A splendidly writtenwith the help of Holbrooke, a managing director at Lehman Brothershighly engrossing narrative of postwar Washington, told by one of the last of America's Wise Men. (Sixteen pages of b&w photosnot seen.) (Book-of-the-Month Club Dual Selection for August)
Pub Date: May 31, 1991
ISBN: 0-394-56995-4
Page Count: 736
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1991
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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