A moving and intimate study of a unique friendship but also of the time and place, now long ago, in which this friendship formed and blossomed. O’Donnell (founder of the Democracy Foundation and a longtime political activist) is the daughter of Kenneth O’Donnell. This work is the fulfillment of a promise she made to her father to tell the story of Robert Kennedy before it’s forgotten, before revisionist history makes of his life less than it was. It’s the story not just of two men, though this is central, but of a group of men who met at Harvard in the early post-WWII years and believed that they had the gifts and responsibility to change the world. As confident and cocky as the US was itself at the time, they did indeed make their mark on history. O’Donnell was with Kennedy throughout Kennedy’s adult life, throughout all the campaigns, the political and personal struggles, the transformation of Kennedy from a distant political operative to a passionate crusader. He entered the White House as JFK’s chief of staff and earned the nickname “Cobra” for his fierce protectiveness of the president and for a demeanor that did not suffer fools lightly. O’Donnell was a man in a man’s world (there are few women central to this story), yet his brusque, macho, can-do image’so like the Kennedys— own—is softened here by stories of warmth,, wit, and kindness. He was devastated by the death first of JFK and then of —Bobby,— riddled with guilt (he decided the final motorcade route for JFK in Dallas, he encouraged Bobby to run for the presidency). “The silence would become deafening,” as the author writes, in the last years of O’Donnell’s life. He would die in 1977 a broken man. In her introduction, the author notes that she set out to write “a good book about two good men.” In this she has succeeded. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: June 10, 1998
ISBN: 0-688-14861-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1998
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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