A fascinating, if somewhat distant, portrait of a cultural icon who happened to also be a mom.
Slate.com political correspondent Dickerson explores his mother’s complicated legacy.
In the 1960s, Nancy Dickerson was one of America’s favorite reporters, rising to TV stardom with a combination of Christiane Amanpour’s reporting skills, Katie Couric’s charm and Jackie O’s sophisticated good looks. Her son attributes Nancy’s success in the male preserve of broadcast journalism to hard work and charisma. Born Nancy Hanschman in 1927, she studied with a speech coach and endeared herself to leading Washington hostesses, who taught her the art of scintillating conversation. An affair with Congressman Ken Keating also greased a few wheels; the author believes the rumors of affairs with JFK and LBJ were false. She married widower Wyatt Dickerson in 1962; John was born in 1968. As a mother, Nancy occupied the large middle ground between Joan Crawford and Carol Brady. She gained only ten pounds when pregnant—“No wonder I had to go to all those doctors in adolescence. She starved me,” John writes with a touch of both humor and pathos, referring to more than just food. Her son doesn’t dwell on Nancy-as-feminist-role-model: He’s sympathetic to the sexism that dogged her, yet he raises some subtle questions about her tactics for breaking through the glass ceiling. Going back to work two weeks after giving birth provided a model for other women that was, in his view, “stoic, but not very helpful.” John’s narrative sometimes moves from his mother’s reporting in the 1960s to his own experiences in the same profession. The chapter on Nancy’s coverage of JFK’s assassination, for example, ends with his recollections of covering the disappearance of John Jr.’s plane over Martha’s Vineyard 36 years later. But these autobiographical touches are basically asides; John writes principally as a journalist digging up the facts about Nancy’s life, and at times, one wishes he would open up a bit more about his own feelings.
A fascinating, if somewhat distant, portrait of a cultural icon who happened to also be a mom.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-8783-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2006
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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