Though the author doesn’t break much new ground, she delivers a forceful statement that cross-party cooperation is necessary...
Democratic National Committee chair Schultz assembles a party platform and memoir organized around improving the lives of America's children, in a debut co-authored by Fenster (FDR's Shadow: Louis Howe, the Force that Shaped Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, 2009, etc.).
A frankly partisan political treatment anticipating the upcoming midterm elections, the author's detailed discussion of the issues chronicles the effects of legislative obstructionism and should help fill in the record for all voters. At age 26, Schultz was the youngest woman ever elected to Florida's state legislature, and she was elected to Congress in 2005, where she has specifically championed the rights of women and children. She is an advocate for bipartisanship and policies based, above all, on fairness. She reviews the major planks in the Democratic Party’s platform, from reform of the financial system to global defense issues and health care, but she also examines social security, Medicare and Medicaid. She takes up particular legislative initiatives dealing with children, women and the family and documents which Republican leaders have represented the most consistent opposition. Schultz is active in the fight against hunger in the United States, and she sponsored the PROTECT Our Children Act of 2008, which aimed the largest law enforcement effort ever against sexual predators and child pornographers and mandated different agencies to cooperate. She also fought for the renewal of the Violence Against Women Act, originally passed in 1994, which was obstructed in the House by tea party supporters. In previous eras, writes the author, these proposed laws, like many others she discusses, would have readily found bipartisan support, not systematic obstruction. Schultz also provides an inspiring account of former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords' successful bipartisan efforts to improve border security in Arizona.
Though the author doesn’t break much new ground, she delivers a forceful statement that cross-party cooperation is necessary to improve political discourse for future generations.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-00099-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
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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