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
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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