An architect, indeed, in the Speerian sense—and that’s no hyperbole. So the reader, sobered and astonished, might well...
A none-too-adulatory study of the man who has been called Bush’s Brain, “American politics’ most talented, prolific, and successful dissembler.”
Karl Rove’s middle name is Christian, and his favorite constituency is Christian, the farther right the better. And yet, TV correspondent Moore and Dallas Morning News political writer Slater reveal, Rove “once told a colleague that he had no religious affiliation and was ‘not a Christian.’ ” Still, perhaps mindful of Lenin’s praise for “useful idiots,” the cynical self-described genius recognized that in the Christian right—and in such underappreciated new phenomena as the mega-churches mushrooming across the land—lay the ground troops for his dream of one-party rule. The party, of course, would be the Republicans, who had once been dominant for half-a-century and could be made to be dominant even longer thanks to the charms of such Roverian dreamboats as Ronald Reagan and George Bush. Possessing a bookie’s knowledge of stats and trends, Rove masterminded every aspect of Bush’s 2000 and 2004 elections, good and bad, using whatever means necessary to divide the enemy, usurp their message, convince supporters that the enemy was an agent of satanic forces—whence such infamous wedge issues as gay marriage, which turn out to be meaningful to just enough of a conservative fringe to settle elections in many a district. It is illuminating to learn that Rove, quite apart from disdaining “the base,” may have certain feelings about gay people because of personal history; it is still more illuminating to know that the GOP’s leadership subscribes to the view of Rove’s own mentor, Michael Ledeen, who, the authors report, once remarked that the president may be excused if he should “enter into evil whenever the very existence of the nation is threatened.” Thus Abramoff, and Iraq, and . . .
An architect, indeed, in the Speerian sense—and that’s no hyperbole. So the reader, sobered and astonished, might well conclude.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-23792-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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