Love the magazine or not, Hubbell’s memoir deserves a read.
A memoir from someone who knew Reader’s Digest inside and out, including its legendary founder William “Wally” Roy DeWitt Wallace.
Veteran journalist Hubbell offers stories about the place where he happily worked for 40 years. Hubbell (born 1927) was a University of Minnesota journalism grad who, after a couple of false starts, submitted an article to the Reader’s Digest. They liked it, Wally hired him, and the rest is his career. It seems almost a charmed life, and he would surely admit as much. Hubbell wasn’t an editor for the Digest; instead, he wrote original investigative pieces and quickly made a name for himself with expertise in military and political matters. In these pages, one finds stories about tense moments in the Cold War, the Vietnam War, PGA highlights (Hubbell loved the game of golf), presidential quirks, Edward Teller and the strategic Defense Initiative, and also biographical stuff about Hubbell’s growing up, all of which forms an engaging picture of an ambitious young man’s rise. He seemed to know everyone who was anyone, especially because, as he repeatedly points out here, working for enormously popular Reader’s Digest provided ready access to those in power (particularly those who shared the Digest’s patriotic, establishmentarian take on things). Although there were some liberals at the Digest—the Vietnam War showed the fault lines—Hubbell was basically conservative, like Wally. Hubbell is almost idolatrous of Wally, and it is hard to fault him on that score: the man was a genial genius at what he did. Aside from a few typos, the narrative has a handful of awkward sentences: e.g., “We are at sea for perhaps an hour, and I am standing near the Skipper, who is standing on a slightly raised platform in the Control Room, near his periscope, which is not up.” Hubbell also doesn’t follow standard usage for periods, commas, and quotation marks, which might distract readers. Still, the story’s a good one. Wally died in 1981, and while he tried to protect the legacy of the Digest, gradually the managerial side won out over the editorial vision that had been true to Wally’s vision. Today, in and out of bankruptcy, Wally’s brainchild is on life support.
Love the magazine or not, Hubbell’s memoir deserves a read.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1484913017
Page Count: 464
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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