Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and journalist FitzGerald (Cities on a Hill, 1986, etc.) mixes comprehensive detail and tart observation in this account of high-tech meeting high-touch—the promotion of the Strategic Defensive Initiative (SDI) by Ronald Reagan. The first two years of the Reagan administration were characterized by a foreign-policy paralysis, in which the amiable but remote President was unable to choose between hard-line anticommunists and pragmatists searching for an accommodation with the Soviets. By 1983 the administration had launched the largest US military buildup in peacetime history, thereby dividing NATO and igniting the nuclear-freeze movement. In that year, Reagan called on scientists to perfect a technology that would render ballistic missiles “impotent and obsolete.” The ensuing “Star Wars” initiative of lasers and particle-beam hardware was formally unveiled in 1985. It was, FitzGerald believes, “Reagan’s greatest triumph as an actor-storyteller,” defanging the freeze movement at one stroke and garnering congressional votes from both Democrats and Republicans despite widespread doubts as to its feasibility. FitzGerald untangles the origins of Reagan’s views on SDI, sketches the ferocious Washington infighting it set off (between George Shultz, Caspar Weinberger, arms-control negotiator Paul Nitze, and others), and depicts the four groundbreaking summits it incited with Gorbachev. She disputes that SDI caused the Soviets to make the concessions that produced the INF treaty and START I, though, noting that Gorbachev dismissed the program as a military threat. Still, she credits Reagan, the most saber-rattling of postwar presidents, with enough prescience to recognize (long before many of his most devoted followers) that the Cold War had reached its end. A difficult subject, endowed with enough drama, irony, and political perception to match its importance.
Pub Date: April 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-84416-8
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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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