A minor but welcome addition to the literature of the Johnson White House.
Lyndon Johnson’s speechwriter and sounding-board Busby offers insight into the blustery Texan’s personality, politics, and work habits.
As a politics reporter, Busby first got to know Johnson in the late 1940s—and what a sight Johnson was, unafraid and decidedly unrefined. Busby recalls some memorable run-ins when then junior politician Johnson confronted the Texas Establishment, as when he told one ranch-and-oil Austin patriarch (whom Busby nicely characterizes as “never bullish on the twentieth century”), “Your brain has been clogged up for thirty years . . . and it would be a service to the city if you poured in a can of Drano to open it up.” To a constituent worried that funding an all-black college would make the rest of Texas’s African-Americans get big ideas, Johnson replied that he had to leave in order to get back to his office before the check went out—so that he could double it. The Texas governor at the time was resigned to Johnson’s ways, remarking, “If Lyndon would only learn that politics is the art of compromise . . . he would make life so much easier for himself—and all his friends.” If Johnson was not keen on learning that art, he was certainly keen to study great predecessors. One of Busby’s charges as a White House advisor was to put some polish on the president’s public persona; he recalls, for instance, that LBJ left a stack of 37 books on Winston Churchill on his desk with a note instructing Busby to “be my Churchill.” Busby tried, pitching in on resounding State of the Union addresses and other speeches that doubtless would have been sweeter to the ear had riots and wars not crowded them out. Busby’s account of LBJ in his last months in office is affecting: he depicts a tired old man worn out by his office, barely holding on in a besieged city and a country torn in two, yet steadily keeping to a 20-hour-a-day schedule.
A minor but welcome addition to the literature of the Johnson White House.Pub Date: March 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-374-27574-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2004
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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