A nostalgic look back and hopeful look forward.
Another Barack Obama staffer reveals his White House experiences.
During his campaign for the presidency and his two terms in office, Obama gathered a cadre of young, articulate, and apparently tireless men and women to serve him. In his debut memoir, Pfeiffer, now co-host of the political podcast Pod Save America, recounts his stints as Obama’s traveling secretary during the campaign and later director of communications (2009-2013) and senior adviser (until 2015). The author’s warm, affectionate portrait of Obama and revelations about pre-Trumpian politics complement recent memoirs by Alyssa Mastromonaco (deputy chief of staff), David Litt (speechwriter), Pat Cunnane (senior writer), and David Axelrod (political adviser) in what appears to be a growing genre. Pfeiffer, an unabashed admirer, burnishes a familiar image of Obama as focused, idealistic, pragmatic, funny, caring, shrewd, savvy, and confidently competitive. “Obama does not like to lose at anything,” writes the author, “—golf, basketball, cards, Scrabble, and most certainly campaigns.” The author disputes the notion that Obama was aloof: “He is a truly decent and empathetic human who genuinely liked being around people (less so members of Congress angling for a photo and a pork barrel project).” He was challenged, though, by a Republican Congress determined to thwart every effort and policy decision and from a vicious media firestorm—eagerly propagated by Fox—over his place of birth. “If you want to know why nativism and racism are resurgent in the Republican Party,” the author writes, “look to Fox News. And if you want to know how we ended up with Trump as president, yet again just look to Fox News.” Part of Pfeiffer’s motivation in writing is to encourage voters—especially millennials—“to knock the GOP upside the head and convince them that they have to abandon not just Trump but Trumpism.” The current Republican Party is composed of “clowns, con men, and racists” and those who enable them, such as “diabolical” and “cynical” Mitch McConnell. Pfeiffer argues that a new path requires Democrats to be “audacious, authentic, and inspirational.”
A nostalgic look back and hopeful look forward.Pub Date: June 19, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5387-1171-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
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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