by Jan Reid ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 3, 2012
Politics junkies—particularly students of strange doings in the Lone Star State—will revel in this sturdy life.
A lucid biography of the Texas politician who briefly mounted the national stage, only to be swept aside by the events of two decades past.
Readers who recall when Texas was Democratic will certainly remember Ann Richards (1933–2006), the tough-talking, motorcycle-riding governor who drove the Bush family to distraction. At the 1988 Democratic National Convention, she famously said of Bush’s gaffes, “He can’t help it—he was born with a silver foot in his mouth.” Bush senior laughed it off, but Bush junior swore vengeance, unseating her as governor and effectively retiring her politically. Reid (Comanche Sundown, 2010, etc.), a former Richards staffer, does a solid and evenhanded, if surely partisan job of recounting Richards’ rise from a politically interested but unconnected, thoroughly liberal homemaker to chief executive of one of the nation’s most important states. The road was rocky, complicated by Richards’ drinking and drug use—a little marijuana here, a few prescription pills there (“But Ann was an alcoholic,” said one intimate. “She had a vodka problem, she didn’t have a drug problem”). Texans generally had no problem with Richards’ habits or friendships with the likes of Lily Tomlin and Willie Nelson, though one particularly ugly Republican smear campaign accused her of bisexuality—and that was before Karl Rove got into the game. Reid notes the considerable curiosities of Texas politics, in which more real power seems to rest with the lieutenant governor than the governor, and the railroad commissioner seems to answer only to God. Richards was nothing if not colorful, but she made dangerous enemies, one of whom would use her supposed indifference to educational excellence to become The Decider.
Politics junkies—particularly students of strange doings in the Lone Star State—will revel in this sturdy life.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-292-71964-4
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Univ. of Texas
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2012
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by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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SEEN & HEARD
by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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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