A strangely distanced, often stilted autobiography by the last white leader of South Africa. Like Mikhail Gorbachev, de Klerk is a fundamentally tragic figure: someone with the courage to abjure his most heartfelt inclinations and bravely lead his country forward—and himself straight out of power. There was little in his background to suggest he would be the man to end apartheid. He was an assiduous, ambitious National Party stalwart, reliably punching the clock in a variety of ministerial assignments, delivering competence but never controversy, slowly climbing the slippery pole of politics . . . and then he changed everything. Modern political autobiographies aren—t noted for their Rousseauian self-revelations, but de Klerk is particularly, even frustratingly opaque. While he provides a useful account of what happened, detailing the minutiae of the negotiating process leading to the creation of the “new South Africa,” he seldom shares the all-important “why.” Unsurprisingly, he claims no knowledge of any of the recently revealed darker activities of the apartheid military-security complex, many of which occurred while he was state president. Yet de Klerk doesn—t shy away from discussing numerous times when he felt slighted or mistreated by Nelson Mandela, whom he depicts as engaging in especially brash and brutal politics (so different from the chummy confraternity of white rule) and also as much more bitter than the official hagiographic portrait. The end of apartheid may have been a moral struggle, but it was above all a grimy political process, and the most fascinating part of this account is the eggshell dance of adversaries, the shifting coalitions, the victories and defeats. Philosophically, perhaps even morally, de Klerk may have shifted, but he never turned from what is perhaps his truest identity: master political operator. Like South Africa’s gold deposits, a lot of the value here is buried deep.
Pub Date: June 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-312-22310-2
Page Count: 432
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1999
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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