A useful handbook, then, for those who run down the middle of the road.
A middling treatise on the virtues of centrism, “putting patriotism before partisanship and the national interest before special interests.”
Speechwriter Avlon, who worked on the 1996 Clinton reelection campaign and for New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, offers an unremarkable thesis: Americans prefer to blend idealism with realism, and in so doing tend to arrive at centrist solutions to political problems that do not wholly please purists on either side of the party divide. Avlon imagines that these purists represent the “far left” (though does anyone still believe that Adlai Stevenson was a Red?) and the “far right” (though how representative is his anticentrist exemplar David Duke?). If that is so, then it’s small wonder that Americans honor the bell curve and cluster middleward. Upon this thesis, Avlon layers profiles of American leaders who supposedly represent centrist values—Richard Nixon, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Jimmy Carter, and the like. In the discussion, Avlon acknowledges that the definition of “centrism” has to be bell-curve broad to accommodate most of these men (women scarcely figure here), but he sometimes misses the point. Nixon, for example, was a centrist less by disposition than self-interest, having been a keen reader of the political winds and knowing that his support lay with “the silent center.” Wilson inclined to the hard right on labor and civil-rights issues. Theodore Roosevelt can rightly be called a centrist, but only if the center line is moved significantly to the left to fit the era of progressivism and trade-union socialism. And so on. Avlon’s portrait of Jimmy Carter is right on the money, though, and the best part here: Carter, he writes, may have inclined to moderation, but “the ultimate absence of unifying leadership within the Carter administration descended directly from the absence of a unifying idea bigger than Jimmy Carter himself.”
A useful handbook, then, for those who run down the middle of the road.Pub Date: March 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-5023-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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