Pulitzer-winning historian Burns (Univ. of Maryland; Government by the People, 1997, etc.) and political scientist Sorenson (Williams Coll.) offer a dyspeptic deconstruction of the Clinton presidency. William Jefferson Clinton aspired to greatness upon assuming the presidency, but, say the authors, he pursued a leadership strategy that assured he would never achieve it. From the outset, Clinton was a centrist, moving slightly to the left or right as expedience necessitated but always returning to an ill-defined middle ground. A day-to-day incrementalist, a policy wonk, Clinton might justly point to a long list of minor accomplishments, but few if any transformative changes in the great issues confronting the nation, from crime to class, from the environment to education. A politically cautious man in early life, he brought the same to the White House and raised it to the level of doctrine, with the help of such ill-advising advisors as Dick Morris. Missing in Clinton, or willingly dispatched with, was the intellectual and moral creativity and courage to change the nation. Events of his presidency—the early defeat of his health care program, the electoral victories of the Republicans in Congress in 1994—have only more firmly lodged him in the center. Vice President Gore and Hillary Rodham Clinton, minor players in this tale, might in other circumstances have been more bold but were obliged to serve the president’s caution. Beyond Clinton, the authors meditate on the nature of modern politics: the atomistic struggle of running for office where personality, not party, matters and few politicians have a strong party base from which to operate; the ideological rigidity—and undemocratic tendencies—of a Republican congressional majority Clinton, astonishingly, tried to bargain with; the indifference of an electorate bombarded by blandness and bombast while little changes for the good. This is neither a “fair” nor an impartial book. It is a call for boldness and courage in public life, written with a passion the authors find so missing in Clinton.
Pub Date: Nov. 9, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-83778-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1999
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
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