Block—a.k.a. ``Herblock''—is a national institution. His drawings—appearing in The Washington Post since 1945—have been cited as factors in the discrediting of McCarthyism (a word he invented), the promotion of racial equality, the warning against nuclear war, and the toppling of Nixon. Here, in a lively memoir, Block rehashes many of his battles against abuses of power and the public trust; especially interesting are his assessments of the Presidents he's caricatured during his seven decades of political commentary. Block rarely second-guesses his earlier opinions, even on Eisenhower, whose posthumous reputation he attributes largely to our forgetting Ike's inaction on civil rights and his pandering to McCarthyism. The author is more charitable to JFK and LBJ, without airbrushing their political and personal flaws. But he reserves his full contempt for Nixon and Bush, whom he portrays as unprincipled opportunists interested only in winning and in helping themselves to the spoils. Sprinkled among the professional memories are anecdotes of Block's early days in Chicago, his army stint, his heart attack, his unsuccessful attempt to learn to swim, and his rubbing elbows with a fair number of the famous, in and out of politics. While Block the cartoonist has always been in the thick of things, his off-duty persona seems to have lived a comparatively placid life. And except for a few scattered comments on the tools and techniques of his trade, he has disappointingly little to say here about the art of cartooning itself (although his comments on a number of his fellow cartoonists are illuminating). Outspoken, unashamedly liberal, and thoroughly readable. (Enriched by 200 vintage Herblock cartoons, plus an eight-page photo insert—not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 18, 1993
ISBN: 0-02-511895-1
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1993
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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