A lively, fair-minded and brisk post-mortem.
Well-documented, blow-by-blow account of the recent presidential election in all its benumbing, however significant and transformative, detail.
Washington Post chief correspondent Balz's book on those fisticuffs is a sequel, he writes, to The Battle for America 2008. The author provides an excellent record of what both candidates’ strategies were, what they needed to deliver to a vastly changing America and how they ultimately fared in the electorate. Balz evidently took copious notes as well as conducted myriad interviews, then and now. The chronicles of his discussions with some of the defeated Republicans, such as Newt Gingrich, are particularly valuable, giving the author a chance to ask: What were they thinking? Indeed, the election’s tone of “nuttiness” was set early on by the protracted process of selecting the Republican front-runner long before President Barack Obama had to get involved; the sideshows concerning Gingrich’s exploding cigars, Tim Pawlenty’s “Obamneycare” and Rick Perry’s “little brain fart” during the Michigan TV debate get the meatiest chapters. The choosing of Romney’s running mate garners a thorough going-over, though there is little on the vice-presidential debates. Indeed, after rehearsing the dueling conventions' highlights (the empty chair, Bill Clinton), Romney’s secretive “47 Percent Solution,” Obama’s lackluster showing at the Denver debate and the October Surprise (in the form of Hurricane Sandy), Balz ties up the actual election rather hastily. Still, he brings out the important shifts in the election process: technology as the key player, the campaigns' all-too-easy use of disguised money, the discrepancy of polls and the rashly high expectations of the Republicans, founded on a willful disregard for reality. Balz’s January 2013 interview with Romney forms a surprisingly touching curtain to the whole spectacle, revealing just how pessimistic the candidate himself was all along.
A lively, fair-minded and brisk post-mortem.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-670-02594-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2013
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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