Sometimes rueful, sometimes defiant, always affecting. Even McCain’s political opponents should admire the fiery grace with...
A valediction by the noted senator and presidential candidate.
Teaming up with constant collaborator and staff member Salter, McCain (Thirteen Soldiers: A Personal History of Americans at War, 2014, etc.) looks back on a long career of service to the country. In a narrative bracketed by intimations of mortality—and by one friend in particular, a classmate who “was laid to rest in the Naval Academy’s cemetery on Hospital Point, a beautiful spot overlooking the Severn River”—McCain opens with a gentle dissection of his failed bid for the presidency, which he admits was a great disappointment but an honor all the same. The breaking news from that account is his retrospective wish that he’d gone with his gut and chosen Joe Lieberman as his running mate, sending “an emphatic statement that I intended to govern collaboratively with an emphasis on problem solving not politics, which in 2008 would have been very good politics.” Yet his advisers convinced him to go with the untested Sarah Palin, particularly as a way to send the message that he, not Barack Obama, was the real agent of change. McCain accepts responsibility for the resulting fiasco: “There’s no use bitching about how you were treated in a presidential campaign,” he writes, adding that he got to keep his day job in the Senate, where his friends have numbered Democrats such as Ted Kennedy—who, McCain notes, died of the same brain cancer that he is now battling—and moderate Republicans like Lindsey Graham. He has less use for the likes of Rand Paul, who stayed in the 2008 race longer than he should have in order to make “a point of some kind to his passionate followers,” and Donald Trump. On that note, he writes provocatively of his part in revealing the Steele dossier of the Trump campaign’s involvement with Russia: “Anyone who doesn’t like it can go to hell.”
Sometimes rueful, sometimes defiant, always affecting. Even McCain’s political opponents should admire the fiery grace with which he’s exiting the world.Pub Date: May 22, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-7800-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
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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