An engaging overview of the president’s early political education.
Journalist McClelland (The Third Coast: Sailors, Strippers, Fishermen, Folksingers, Long-Haired Ojibway Painters, and God-Save-the-Queen Monarchists of the Great Lakes, 2008, etc.) looks at the effect of President Obama’s years in Chicago.
Obama first came to Chicago in 1985 as a recent Columbia University graduate to work as a community organizer in the housing projects on Chicago’s South Side. After a three-year absence to attend Harvard Law School, he went on to spend his entire political career in Chicago—first as an Illinois state senator, then as Illinois’s junior U.S. Senator—before becoming president. McClelland, a former staff writer for the Chicago Reader, reported on Obama during his time in the city, and he provides a vivid portrait of Chicago and its politics—from the poor Altgeld Gardens housing projects, where Obama directed the Developing Communities Project as an organizer, to the nearby affluent academic neighborhood of Hyde Park, where he taught as a law professor at the University of Chicago. The city’s rough-and-tumble political atmosphere toughened Obama as a legislator and honed his skill at making important political alliances. He also got an education in bare-knuckle political tactics, knocking rivals out of his initial state senate race by aggressively challenging voter petitions. Through legislation, he worked to remedy the city’s infamous political corruption. His failed run for a seat in the U.S. Congress in 2000 made him rethink his staid and professorial public demeanor, transforming him into a stunningly charismatic speechmaker. Significantly, he was also forced to confront the complex politics of race in a city with the largest population of African-Americans in the United States—some of whom questioned the authenticity of the mixed-race Obama’s “blackness.” While McClelland perhaps overstates the importance of Chicago on the national political stage—“[O]nly in Chicago could a black man become president of the United States”—he makes a convincing case that President Obama’s experiences in his adopted city shaped him profoundly and helped make him the seasoned and formidable politician he is today.
An engaging overview of the president’s early political education.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-60819-060-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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 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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