Still, some worthy nuggets to be mined from these pages.
Vest-pocket portraits of people, places, and events from veteran newscaster Brinkley that have the brisk familiarity of Cliffs Notes.
Brinkley, who died earlier this year, dispenses, with an easy hand, his views on a number of newsmakers and historical events. At their best, these bite-sized pieces have fun poking sideways at pretension and folly, of lifting the mask of face value. It may be WWII-era Washington, DC: “Sleepy, often slow-moving, inbred, and thoroughly segregated,” wherein “the antiquated character of the city was most visible in Congress,” and epitomized by the opportunistic bigot Senator Theodore Bilbo. Or it may be the role that ambition played in Robert Kennedy’s politics: “To set himself up as the alternative to Johnson in the Democratic Party . . . he had no choice but to move to Johnson’s left.” His early “Our Man in…” travelogues have a warmth that lets readers peek under his own mask—in the Mediterranean, “the places we visited were so full of the things that define our own civilization . . . that I often felt like a grown man who had come back to walk around in the town he was born in.” His background as a southerner and as a longtime inhabitant of Washington gave him perspective on the Civil Rights movement, though progressive for all that. And, really, who better to pen an article on national political conventions, having covered 24 of them—“nothing was more spontaneous and unpredictable than the rowdy, chaotic, ridiculous, and endlessly entertaining political convention”—though “endless” was pushing it: “By the end, no one (including me) was paying much attention.” Less enlightening are the pieces in which he didn’t have a first-person presence. “I hardly knew the man myself,” he writes in a J. Edgar Hoover profile, and elsewhere, “I barely knew [Joseph] McCarthy myself.” He is correct: he hardly, barely knew them.
Still, some worthy nuggets to be mined from these pages.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-40644-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2003
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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