By the end, the text has abandoned its disguise as a memoir and revealed its true identity as a rather conventional campaign...
A courageous Colombian senator, member of a politically active family, charts her course through the dangerous political waters of her troubled country.
Currently running for president of Colombia, Betancourt begins in December 1996, when she had an ominous meeting with an anonymous man who warned that her life was in imminent jeopardy because her aggressive anti-corruption agenda angered the nation’s druglords and their minions. Alarmed, Betancourt hurried home, gathered up her children, and whisked them off to New Zealand to stay with their father, from whom the author separated in 1990. We return to this meeting 180 pages later. In the interim, Betancourt takes us back to her somewhat privileged childhood in France, where her father served as a UNESCO official. Her parents separated when she was 14, but Betancourt admired them both for their rigorous political and personal rectitude. In the summer of 1986, she returned to Colombia to visit her mother, who worked to better the lives of homeless children, and decided to become a legislator. First, Betancourt helped her mother win a senate campaign; soon, she received an appointment in the ministry of education. She was and is horrified by the corruption and apathy in Colombia’s government. Describing a visit to a coastal village repeatedly leveled by storms, she asks, “What kind of democracy is it that lets its people die like this without any choice?” Throughout, Betancourt employs the present tense, which creates an affecting immediacy and compelling urgency. As we follow her triumphs and travails, including a trial on trumped-up ethics charges and a fortunate escape from an assassination attempt, we feel we are alongside her. But she is not always a tolerable companion. Her righteous indignation sometimes devolves into simple self-righteousness, and repeated accounts of her own ethical purity eventually grate rather than ingratiate.
By the end, the text has abandoned its disguise as a memoir and revealed its true identity as a rather conventional campaign autobiography.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2002
ISBN: 0-06-000890-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2001
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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