After Mayor, Politics, and All the Best—three works that would surely have worn out the ``I'' key on an old-fashioned typewriter—what more has New York's cantankerous former mayor to say? Well, while earlier books have rehashed political battles, this one, Koch says, deals with personal moments. How's he doin'? Not bad at winning sympathy at first, with accounts of his pinched family and their exploitation by a richer uncle, of his gruesome war memories and his mother's death from cancer. But once out of law school and into the world, the story seems to confirm the suspicion that Koch never had a personal life. The author revisits familiar political territory—his early reform politics in Greenwich Village; his years on the City Council and in Congress and three terms as mayor; the numerous political campaigns—with emphasis on interpersonal frictions and attention to his ``feelings'': ``I was miserable in Washington''; ``I was incensed.'' The book's refrain might be ``For that I will never forgive him [or her]''; and, like Koch's other books, it's full of catty comments (``Liz [Taylor] looked like a huge horse''), word- for-word replays of petty confrontations, and rancorous complaints of what Koch claims are blacks' special privileges and demagogic leaders. And though Koch boasts repeatedly of his candor, there is no real soul-searching here. He confesses to being deeply depressed by the corruption scandals during his last term, even to entertaining ideas of suicide (``I was in absolute unrelenting agony'')—but not to any mistakes in judgment or to having tolerated patronage arrangements. Today, with ``nine jobs'' (mostly as a media personality), ``I've never been happier''—though Koch can't say the same for his cherished city: ``Mayor Dinkins is doing such a poor job.'' Testy as ever, with some juicy dish and a few good spite stories you can cheer. (Sixteen-page photo insert—not seen.)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-312-08161-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1992
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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