Gives meaning to the phrase "a heartbeat away," especially when applied to an official who could possibly ascend to the...
The former vice president shares a detailed history of his heart attacks, alternating sections with the doctor who has supervised the surgeries to keep him alive despite multiple near-death experiences.
Cheney (In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir, 2011) experienced his first heart attack in 1978. During his varied career in politics—as a representative, secretary of defense, chief of staff and vice president—Cheney’s bosses and associates generally knew about his weak heart, as did attentive members of the general citizenry. Perhaps, however, few understood how often the balky heart kept Cheney on the sidelines or slowed his performance. Reiner (Medicine/George Washington Univ.) inherited Cheney as a patient from a retiring doctor. The two men formed a close bond as repeated heart attacks, suspected attacks and the resulting fallout in compromised health forced them into proximity. Cheney rarely examines his partisan politics within the text, and Reiner eschews politics completely. Instead, they lean toward the teaching mode, hoping readers will grasp the importance of preventive medical care and appreciate the vast progress made in recent decades in the field of heart surgery. For the most part, the patient and the doctor explain themselves clearly and strike the appropriate didactic tone. At times, the details from Cheney range from self-indulgent to tiresome, and it’s unlikely that Democratic readers will pay any attention to this book. For the most part, however, Cheney’s survival instincts come across as admirable, whether he is admired or despised by readers for his political decision-making. Also open to question: whether President George W. Bush and his advisers should have asked Cheney to serve as vice president for eight years knowing his health history and possible future dangers.
Gives meaning to the phrase "a heartbeat away," especially when applied to an official who could possibly ascend to the highest office in the land.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4767-2539-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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