A vivid, behind-the-scenes peek into the business of politics.
A lawyer looks back on his long career of campaigning at the local, state, and national levels.
In this debut memoir, Patton recounts decades of his political work for Democrats. Raised on a farm in “nearly pristine white” Iowa, he became a traveler in Europe, a ski bum in Colorado, and a college and law school student at the University of Iowa. After helping his father get elected as an Iowa state senator, Patton went on to join many other Democratic campaigns across the country, from city council races in Connecticut to presidential primaries in California. He learned practical political skills, such as voter targeting, advance work, and encouraging people to “vote more than once” in straw polls. In the nation’s capital, he volunteered for the Washington Urban League and joined in organizing the 1968 Poor People’s March. In 1970, he helped Walter Fauntroy become the District of Columbia’s first congressional representative in a century. Patton continued to campaign for African-American candidates in D.C., even helping ex-mayor Marion Barry win an election after the politician’s release from prison. He also did union work for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees in New York and set up a lobbying firm. Over the course of this memoir, the author mixes with such political notables as Hubert Humphrey, Ed Muskie, and Barack Obama. Overall, it’s an entertaining account of politics in modern America. The book’s title is misleading, though, as only part of it involves Patton’s work with African-American candidates; it also devotes a lot of space to white candidates and his personal life. A few statements may seem patronizing, such as, “From time to time, when things hadn’t gone his way, [Barry] had pointed the accusatory finger at white people. I would chuckle, knowing that when the full and objective story of the city’s political development was told, white folks would have a major role.” Also, Patton and others breathe “sigh[s] of relief” so often that they seem to risk hyperventilation. However, the author’s anecdotes do provide insights into the realities of American politicking in a pleasantly conversational style. This isn’t a tell-all, but Patton certainly tells enough to give readers a salty taste of politics and of the sometimes-corrupting power of money—although it may make it harder to agree that “electioneering is a noble cause.”
A vivid, behind-the-scenes peek into the business of politics.Pub Date: June 10, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9975284-0-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Patton Corporation
Review Posted Online: Oct. 3, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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