Certain to appeal to Clinton devotees, especially in light of the possibility of still further Bill Clinton endeavors as...
The post-presidential life of Bill Clinton.
In this admiring account, veteran journalist and National Memo editor-in-chief Conason (It Can Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush, 2007, etc.) traces the former president’s career from his 2001 departure from the White House—when he was $11 million in debt, vilified by “habitual haters,” and seeking some purpose—to his present role as head of the Clinton Global Initiative, with a “sterling international image” as perhaps “the most popular man in the world.” Written with the cooperation of Clinton and his staff, the author’s often absorbing chronicle captures the energy and charisma of the former president as he turns to the admiring global community, launching a “frantic, peripatetic career as the world’s best-paid public speaker” and finding a mission in his philanthropic work in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere. While badly bloated with needless details on travels, the sniping of enemies, and ceaseless card games, the book offers sharp insights into the roles of loyal aids, most notably Ira Magaziner, as well as family members in supporting Clinton’s initiatives to fight AIDS and other diseases and to rebuild communities around the world. Inspired by a desire to create a substantive alternative to the World Economic Forum, the CGI has become a powerful model for entrepreneurial cooperation in world affairs. The author offers many telling details: how he learned from Nelson Mandela to view with compassion those who had wronged him; how he bonded with George H.W. Bush in disaster relief efforts and clashed with presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama; and his advising of British Prime Minister Tony Blair at the onset of the Iraq War. Conason also tells the stories of the creation of the Clinton library in Little Rock and the making of the ex-president’s memoir, My Life.
Certain to appeal to Clinton devotees, especially in light of the possibility of still further Bill Clinton endeavors as first gentleman.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4391-5410-6
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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
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