Kander seems like the rare politician you might actually want to have a beer with; if you can't, this book is the next best...
The young politician whom Barack Obama called "the future of the Democratic party" reflects on lessons learned in the military and public service.
Ask any Democratic strategist for a short list of names to watch, and Kander is sure to come up. A lawyer and former Army captain, he served in Missouri's House of Representatives and then as secretary of state. He ran for U.S. Senate in 2016 and was narrowly defeated, but he vastly outperformed Democrats in a state that went handily for Donald Trump. Since the election, Kander has traveled to nearly every state in America, advocating for voting rights as a part of his nonprofit organization Let America Vote. In many ways, his book is typical of political memoirs. He takes us through his military and political careers, laying out a case for his experience and how it has prepared him to lead. (Though he hasn't officially announced that he's running for another office, the book serves as a clear indication that we haven't seen the last of his name on a ballot.) What keeps the book from feeling canned or hackneyed is precisely what has made the author so successful as a politician: a magic combination of authenticity, principle, and humor. It's clear from the book that Kander has mastered the art of the humble brag; he highlights his accomplishments without apology but never comes across as arrogant. He underscores his progressive values even while calling a red state home. Perhaps most importantly to the reader, he's often laugh-out-loud funny (particularly in his liberal use of footnotes). There's nothing groundbreaking about the book except that it affirms that Kander has what so many politicians spend a lifetime searching for—and he makes it look easy.
Kander seems like the rare politician you might actually want to have a beer with; if you can't, this book is the next best thing.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5387-4759-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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