This concise biography makes a good case that Reagan was the second most important president of the 20th century after...
The latest in the commendable American Presidents series is a thoughtful biography of an increasingly well-regarded president.
Many observers during Ronald Reagan’s presidency held a low opinion of his intellect. Time has not altered that perception, but most historians, including Slate Group chairman and former Slate magazine editor Weisberg (The Bush Tragedy, 2008, etc.) agree, often reluctantly, that he presided over significant changes in the United States. Although no conservative like his subject, Weisberg takes his historical duties seriously, laying out Reagan’s actions with an admirable lack of pop psychology. A successful radio announcer and actor, Reagan enjoyed politics, serving twice as Screen Actors Guild president before election as California governor in 1966. Attuned to the national rightward swing, he denounced government, regulation, and taxes but left implementation to his staff, who discovered, to their annoyance, that he hated conflict and had no objection to compromise. “He knew what he believed, meant what he said, and made clear what he intended to do,” writes the author. “He didn’t suffer from anxiety or self-doubt. The search for something beneath the surface has tended to produce few results.” The massive tax cut that began his presidency did not discourage him from extolling a balanced budget, and he accepted the almost yearly tax increases that followed. He appointed Antonin Scalia to the Supreme Court but also, despite objections, Sandra Day O’Connor. The electorate loved his speeches attacking student protesters, welfare, and communism, but activism seemed to bore him, except in his campaign against nuclear war. Ignoring opposition from his administration and outrage from conservative commentators, he embraced disarmament proposals from the new Soviet premier, Mikhail Gorbachev.
This concise biography makes a good case that Reagan was the second most important president of the 20th century after Franklin Roosevelt.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9727-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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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