A modest, soft-spoken book that is sure to enrage its chief subject.
Former FBI director Comey, much in the news, reviews his career and speaks his mind about his dismissal.
“I fully intended to serve as director of the FBI through the year 2023,” writes Comey, that year being when his 10-year term, begun under Barack Obama, expired. “What, I wondered, could possibly interfere with that?” The “what” was Donald Trump, who, under investigation for various improprieties committed during his campaign and perhaps after, demanded personal loyalty of Comey and did not receive the required affirmative reply. “Holy crap, they are trying to make each of us an ‘amica nostra’—friend of ours,” he writes, adverting to time he spent pursuing Mafia figures as a federal prosecutor in New York. As has been well-reported, the author weighs Trump and his colleagues and finds them wanting in every way: “this president is unethical,” he charges, “and untethered to truth and institutional values.” That president, he adds with a touch of informed speculation, is also bound for greater legal troubles than he has faced thus far. Comey looks back on a long career marked by such signature moments as his uncovering Dick Cheney associate Scooter Libby as the person who leaked the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame, a matter over which he came under considerable pressure to back off the case, one of the many “exhausting lessons in the importance of institutional loyalty over expediency and politics” that he would learn in service to three administrations. Along the way, aside from a couple of personal digs at Trump’s clothing style and hand size, Comey serves up some well-observed remarks on the qualities of a successful leader, including humor, “accurate feedback” and pushing for improvement, especially self-improvement—again, all matters in which the current occupant of the White House falls short. Not all the book will be convincing, especially to supporters of Trump’s opponent, whose campaign suffered a tremendous blow when Comey announced that she, too, was under investigation.
A modest, soft-spoken book that is sure to enrage its chief subject.Pub Date: April 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-19245-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2018
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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
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