A be-nicer-to-each-other program that’s worth considering though unlikely to take shape in a time of growing division.
The former Ohio governor and Republican presidential candidate urges readers to get their own houses in order.
It’s nice to be nice, and even if the man to whom Kasich lost the 2016 primary isn’t very nice, he counsels “that we shouldn’t be investing all of our emotions in that one office in the White House.” Quoting the likes of the Who and the Kings of Leon, he reckons that it’s up to us to change the world in smaller ways, telling uplifting stories “that remind us that everything we do accrues to the good—and, inversely, that everything we don’t do lines up against us.” That is, assuming that what we do is do good in the first place, such as the young woman who, in the absence of the person employed to do the job, donned a Chuck E. Cheese costume to save the day for a young man on the spectrum who would otherwise have been shattered by a missed hug. Kasich proffers a list of 10 principles, and, within the chapters devoted to them, he sometimes offers surprises, as when he defends Colin Kaepernick for taking a knee “as a way to call attention to racial justice and oppression.” Many of Kasich’s homilies are rather pointedly Christian, but by way of Mr. Rogers and not Franklin Graham: “We need to care for each other, love each other…acknowledge each other.” We also must “get out of our silo” and start listening to each other’s points of view, quizzing our sources of news in the same way that we would test the claims of a used-car salesman, said occupation being perhaps the only one held in less esteem than that of a politician. There’s nothing objectionable about the author’s 10-point program, though some farther to the right than he might not be happy with all of his examples.
A be-nicer-to-each-other program that’s worth considering though unlikely to take shape in a time of growing division.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-335-01220-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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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