Clarifies some of the candidate’s fuzzy past but is hardly disinterested.
’Tis the season for tendentious biographies of presidential candidates; this one’s favorable.
Washingtonian editor at large Jaffe (co-author: Dream City: Race, Power, and the Decline of Washington, D.C., 1994) returns with a very positive account of the political rise—and political convictions—of the U.S. senator from Vermont and candidate for the presidency. Sanders didn’t cooperate with Jaffe (the senator does not like to talk about himself), but the author did score an interview with Sanders’ wife, Jane, and conducted lots of boots-on-the-ground reporting, with help from others. Accordingly, the sections about Sanders’ Brooklyn boyhood, adolescence, collegiate years, and somewhat beyond are sketchy, and it’s not until Sanders entered public life after a move to Vermont—a third-party candidacy for Senate in 1972 (he drew just over 2 percent of the vote)—that the facts begin to flow. Jaffe charts Sanders’ electoral failures and victories (from Burlington mayor and beyond) and identifies his key aides and supporters. We also get occasional testimonials from voters, then and now. There were some youthful mistakes in Sanders’ life—a failed marriage, a child out of wedlock—and Jaffe, to his credit, does not neglect them. Nor does he fail to point out unpleasant aspects of Sanders’ political life—e.g., his back-and-forth relationship with the National Rifle Association, his failure (so far) to attract black voters. The author also explores the history of socialism and declares that Sanders, though far left in his youth, now has “his own distinct brand of socialist doctrine”—a brand that does not please many pure socialists. We learn, too, that Sanders is not easy to work with: he has the unpleasant trait of believing what he says and saying what he believes. Jaffe concludes that Sanders matters because he prefers democracy to oligarchy.
Clarifies some of the candidate’s fuzzy past but is hardly disinterested.Pub Date: Dec. 22, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-68245-017-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Regan Arts
Review Posted Online: Dec. 31, 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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