A revealing biography that should serve as the starting point for future evaluations of the 41st president.
An admiring life of the president who navigated the end game of the Cold War and stood up to Saddam Hussein.
The more time that passes from the end of George H.W. Bush’s one-term presidency, the more important he seems to grow, perhaps in contrast to the more dynamic and obviously flawed personalities of the presidents that served before and after him. Pulitzer Prize–winning author Meacham (Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power, 2012, etc.), working in cooperation with Bush, his wife, Barbara, and their family, does a fine job of revealing the makeup of the man, destined—by virtue of his Eastern Ivy League pedigree and as second son of Prescott Bush, future Connecticut senator—for greatness. Competitive by nature, steady, and dependable—World War II pilot, devoted husband, and loyal Republican Party operative—Bush was decent perhaps to a fault. Americans seem to like their presidents given to grand gestures (see Teddy Roosevelt), but this went against Bush’s buttoned-up, discreet style, to his frequent political misfortune. “He was a victim, in a way, of his instinct for dignity,” writes Meacham. Bush’s innate dignity indeed proved problematic early on with his move to big-oil Texas to set up roots in the late 1950s. The move was an attempt to forge his own destiny apart from his aristocratic East Coast family, but he never quite fit in. Part of Bush’s early agony was caused by adopting positions that were far more conservative and right wing than were consistent with his true views—and then having to reverse them. In the end, he emerged from being eclipsed by larger personalities (Reagan, James Baker, Lee Atwater) to forge a steady, effective course during the world perils in Europe, China, and Iraq. In this meticulously researched but perhaps overlong biography, Meacham does his best with this “underwhelming” but noble subject.
A revealing biography that should serve as the starting point for future evaluations of the 41st president.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6765-7
Page Count: 864
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Nov. 26, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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