Monster or savior? Norteamericano leaders accustomed to the view of Chávez as evil incarnate may value this alternate,...
The late Venezuelan leader—or strongman, or dictator, if you like—tells all.
Chávez’s first life is over and done with, ended by a long bout with cancer in 2013. But before it ended, inspired by his friend Fidel Castro to do so, he sat down with French journalist Ramonet for what was supposed to be a “100 hours with…” portrait but wound up filling twice that many hours of tape. Ramonet is nothing if not admiring: he heralds Chávez as an intellectual who “picked out concepts, analyses, stories and examples which he engraved on his prodigious memory, and then beamed out to the public at large through his torrents of speeches and talks.” He also knew his way around a machine gun (and coup d’état, of course), a “Belorussian tractor” or Picasso-an canvas or García Márquez–ian manuscript or baseball diamond, and all with a native cunning born of desperate poverty and a sharp ambition to make something of himself. Here, prompted by Ramonet’s sometimes-softball inquiries—“Did you pray at night before going to bed?”; “Despite your political activity, you didn’t give up baseball”—Chávez recounts his rise to the head of the Venezuelan government, a career trajectory helped along by a willing army and inspired by Bolivarian heroes such as Ezequiel Zamora, who “wanted to change Venezuela and make it a fairer, more just country.” Thus it ever is with reformistas, and so it was when Chávez, early on, declared, “one of the main aims of our revolution was to distribute Venezuelan land in a fairer, more harmonious way.” Venezuela’s 1 percenters and the yanquis who backed them notwithstanding, Chávez seems content to have put an end to the previous oligarchy, which, in terms Castro would doubtless applaud, he calls “a false theoretical construct.”
Monster or savior? Norteamericano leaders accustomed to the view of Chávez as evil incarnate may value this alternate, assuredly self-serving presentation of facts and events.Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-78478-383-9
Page Count: 520
Publisher: Verso
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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