Barbed, to be sure, but less grouchy than exasperated and a pleasure for like-minded readers.
The curmudgeonly actor, best known for his zeitgeist-riding portrayal of journalist Lou Grant, weighs in on the Constitution and its discontents in a smart, often entertaining polemic.
It’s a common conservative trope that progressives are on a mission to undo the intent of the Founding Fathers and destroy the compact under which the nation operates. Not so, writes Asner. Progressives, he suggests, are working more closely in spirit with the Constitution on numerous issues, such as its linkage of the right to own guns to service in a well-regulated militia. “Nothing in the Constitution suggests, let alone enforces, the concepts of limited government, limited taxes, and limited regulations,” argues the author, just as very little in the private lives of the founders inspires admiration: more than half of the framers of the Constitution were slaveholders, many were involved in shady land speculation, some later committed treason, and many used public office to line their purses. (As Asner notes, George Washington’s presidential salary of $25,000 a year is the equivalent of $1.5 million today. He adds, “he probably needed the money,” since he was, like so many of those framers, wracked with debt.) The true enemies of the Constitution, Asner holds, are the tea party and Christian right and gun lobby and so forth, about which he impatiently writes, “why don’t they just write our country a new Bill of Rights and be done with it?”—declaring Christianity to be the official religion of the land, kicking down the doors to ferret out gays and abortion clinics, and so on. The opportunities for hyperbole and rant are many, but Asner retains a mostly even tone, closing with a timely line from Thomas Jefferson: “The care of human life and happiness and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government.”
Barbed, to be sure, but less grouchy than exasperated and a pleasure for like-minded readers.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6602-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2017
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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
PERSPECTIVES
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