An interesting, behind-the-scenes glimpse of life at the White House.
A memoir by a Navy physician whose patients were U.S. presidents and their families.
Rising up the ranks from captain to rear admiral during her service at the White House, Dr. Mariano was the first woman and first Filipino-American to become the physician to a president and the director of the White House medical unit. She writes of her experiences with humor and justifiable pride. This is no fly-on-the-wall tell-all, although she does comment on the “tall, slender, long-haired beauties” who used to preen in front of President Clinton—they were called “POTUS bait” by the staff. While there were only minor alarms and excitements during her nine years on the job—Bush I’s last year and Clinton’s two terms—she faced some challenging moments and passed with flying colors through tough security-training exercises, countermanding her former boss’s instructions when he refused to relinquish his job and brushing off snide remarks that she benefited from a personal relationship with the president. Though she was the “wrong sex, wrong color, even wrong height [and] didn’t look like the stereotypical White House doctor,” Mariano persevered, with special help from the “silent servant class at the White House…the people of every day attended to the leader of the free world in his private quarters.” As director of the medical unit, she instituted a number of changes to improve the standard of care, including 24/7 on-site medical staffing and updated treatment protocols. She traveled with more than 130 overseas presidential trips and many times worked grueling hours, making the painful choice to sacrifice her own family time to serve two first families. Her retirement from the Navy in 2001 was simultaneously a time of celebration and sadness.
An interesting, behind-the-scenes glimpse of life at the White House.Pub Date: June 22, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-312-53483-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2010
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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