An odd but endearing look at a president the nation is finally beginning to understand and appreciate.
A former speechwriter for George H.W. Bush pens a heartfelt appreciation of the president.
The last of the Greatest Generation to occupy the Oval Office, Bush was a genuine war hero, who by 1987 had to contend with “the wimp factor” as he ran for the White House. A Yale-educated East Coast patrician, he was also a Texas oilman who loved country music and pork rinds. Elected to two terms in the House, defeated in a Senate race and in the 1980 presidential primary, he was a politician, yes, but one whose most distinguished service came by appointment: envoy to China, CIA director, U.N. ambassador. His candidacy always posed genuine problems for an American electorate not quite sure what to make of him. Today, he’s our oldest, and polls say our most-respected, living ex-president, a product of an America barely remembered. In this highly impressionistic, idiosyncratic treatment of Bush, Smith (English/Univ. of Rochester; A Talk in the Park: Nine Decades of Baseball Tales from the Broadcast Booth, 2011, etc.) frequently adverts to that bygone era with passages about cultural markers—the Andy Griffith Show, the Pearl Harbor Arizona Memorial, the Polo Grounds—and characters—Bert Parks, Pat Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Glenn Ford, Ted Williams, Yogi Berra—all icons perfectly at home in the pages of the Saturday Evening Post, where the author worked. Smith mixes in a good deal of his own career in journalism, academia and politics, but he devotes the bulk of the narrative to Bush’s presidency and retirement when Smith helped to craft speeches for the oratorically challenged president. Little lyricism is attached to Bush’s rhetoric, but he had what Smith calls a “poetry of the heart.” Up close, the author observed the essential Bush, and in numerous vignettes, he depicts a man of courtesy, sound judgment, uncommon decency, and strict devotion to country, friends and family.
An odd but endearing look at a president the nation is finally beginning to understand and appreciate.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1612346854
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Potomac Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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