Fine cultural history, especially welcome in a time when the L-word is a pejorative.
A capable evocation of an American brahminate: the eminent liberal intelligentsia that led Ivy League schools and major cities through tough times—and that led America into Vietnam.
The principal players in former Yale history lecturer Kabaservice’s drama are gone: Cyrus Vance died in 2002 at the age of 84, having served several Democratic presidents and other elected officials, including his friend John Lindsay, who “appointed Vance to the four-member Knapp Commission to look into police corruption; the investigation presented a major headache for the mayor as the commission turned up evidence of widespread police graft and inaction on the part of City Hall.” Lindsay died two years earlier, having seen New York through some of its hardest years; his successor, Ed Koch, “particularly enjoyed scapegoating the patrician ex-mayor,” laying the blame for the city’s woes at Lindsay’s door. McGeorge Bundy, the architect of much Johnson administration Vietnam policy, died in 1996, disgraced; his friend Elliot Richardson died in 1999, similarly fallen from grace. All outlived their great friend Kingman Brewster, the visionary president of Yale, who took the university into the coed age and gave Richard Nixon fits by espousing a variety of left-of-center causes. Indeed, Kabaservice notes, Supreme Court chief justice Warren Burger considered a statement Brewster made that questioned whether black revolutionaries could “achieve a fair trial anywhere in the United States” to be the most seditious thing he had heard uttered in his lifetime. This constellation, writes Kabaservice, formed the heart of American liberalism, a cause that made considerable headway in the early Cold War era but then gave way before the radicalism of the New Left and the resurgence of the Old Right. Their failure to speak to the “broad American middle, whether defined in terms of class or of outlook,” made liberalism irrelevant and paved the way for Reaganism and Bushism.
Fine cultural history, especially welcome in a time when the L-word is a pejorative.Pub Date: April 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-8050-6762-0
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2003
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
PERSPECTIVES
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