A sometimes-sludgy gumbo of a memoir that could use more salt.
A former U.S. Democratic senator for Maine and Presidential Medal of Freedom winner revisits significant moments in his long public and private life.
Mitchell was Senate majority leader (1989-1995) and left that now-costive body in 1995 to see more of his family and to pursue some other challenges, from baseball to Northern Ireland. He begins with family background (money was tight; everyone worked hard), telling a few childhood anecdotes that seem well-polished by campaign repetition. He had an influential high school English teacher who gave him Steinbeck to read. He worked his way through Bowdoin College, joined ROTC and entered the pre-Vietnam–era military, working in Berlin for the Office of Security. Then came law school and politics, where he fell under the sway of Sen. Ed Muskie, who subsequently became an ardent supporter of Mitchell’s career. The author’s segments on his political doings veer back and forth between detailed accounts of various legislative activities (the Clean Air Act) and lines that seem lifted from his stump speeches (“My father had told me that hard work could solve any problem”). Mitchell blasts Oliver North for lying during the Iran-Contra controversy, skims over the details of his divorce and remarriage, crows a bit about the benefits he was able to gain for Maine, and rails about the demands of fundraising. Following his Senate career, he took on numerous assignments—ranging from the thankless to the intractable—including Northern Ireland, Disney (where he served on the board of directors), the Salt Lake City Olympics (he does not mention Mitt Romney), the baseball drug scandals, and the Middle East, where he—like everyone else—failed to negotiate a deal for a Palestinian state. He ends with a saccharine self-help chapter about negotiating.
A sometimes-sludgy gumbo of a memoir that could use more salt.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4516-9137-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
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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