A compelling re-telling of one of the saddest and most intriguing life stories in American politics.
Newsweek assistant managing editor Thomas (The Very Best Men, 1995, etc.) enlivens his engrossing RFK biography with fresh interviews and the use of previously restricted sources.
Unlike his princely elder brothers, Robert Kennedy was not blessed with ease or grace, nor could he bask, as they did, in the ambitious attentions of their powerful father. RFK did, however, possess courage and determination in prodigious degrees, and Thomas stresses that it was through the exercise of these qualities that RFK won for himself a place of honor, first in his family, and finally in American politics. Thomas paints a moving portrait of RFK as a boy, the runt of his family and a poor student, fighting determinedly to win the admiration of his father and of his elder brothers, all of whom he regarded with reverence. Through these struggles RFK gained a feeling of fellowship with outsiders and underdogs, which would be most famously displayed during his tragic campaign for the presidential nomination. His ferocity and determination were also put at the service of elder brother John, whose political campaigns he managed and whom he would serve as Attorney General and most trusted adviser. John had once dismissed his brooding little brother as “Black Robert,” but he eventually came to appreciate his loyalty and his dogged determination to win. After John’s assassination, RFK devoted years to mourning him. Although Thomas conveys the powerful sense of hope RFK’s campaign awakened, he does not speculate on what RFK might have accomplished if he’d avoided the assassin’s bullet. Instead, he ends his account with a description of RFK’s eloquently simple grave—which is fitting, since it is from the unfulfilled promise of a candidate who combined determined courage with a gentle concern for underdogs that the fascination with RFK mainly springs.
A compelling re-telling of one of the saddest and most intriguing life stories in American politics.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-83480-4
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2000
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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