You must admire a man whose career advice included, “I often say it’s a gift to be fired at least once,” and “it is always...
A man of many contradictions looks back on a lifetime of service to people in the public and private sectors.
Vaughn (1920-2012) may not have the name recognition of contemporaries like George McGovern or Sargent Shriver, but his influence echoes through the fabric of American life. Vaughn worked on this autobiography from 1992 until his death, and his daughter, Constantineau, completed the project. To her credit, Vaughn’s distinctive voice and sense of humor remain. A politically conservative but socially liberal public servant, Vaughn served as the second director of the Peace Corps, ambassador to Panama and Colombia, and head of the National Urban Coalition and Planned Parenthood Federation of America. What could have been—and sporadically is—a dry accounting of a career in service is punctuated by Vaughn’s colorful personality and front-row seat to world history. The author describes fighting as a Marine in bloody battles in Guam and Okinawa and boxing professionally from the Golden Gloves to Latin America. The title comes from a match in Juarez that earns Vaughn’s commentary: “The bad news was that I was the gringo. The good news was that I had not yet become familiar with the Spanish verb ‘to kill.’ ” Later, the author describes meeting a sickly doctor in Panama in the mid-1950s who later became the revolutionary Che Guevara. Republican Vaughn earned the ire of Bobby Kennedy and a “Good going, son!” from his boss, Lyndon Johnson. Occasionally, the author lapses into a listless retelling of his uneven career arc, but there’s enough engaging eyewitness history to make it a worthy read and a textbook for those seeking a career in public service.
You must admire a man whose career advice included, “I often say it’s a gift to be fired at least once,” and “it is always better to be rumored to work for the CIA than to actually be employed there.”Pub Date: April 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-945572-17-3
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Vireo/Rare Bird Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
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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