Politics junkies will find this rewarding, particularly in Alter’s account of the inner workings of the White House and...
Newsweek senior editor Alter (The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope, 2006, etc.) turns in a freshman-year report card for the sitting president, with mixed but generally good grades.
Obama is acing civics, to be sure, but he’s having difficulty with some of the schoolyard bullies. A case in point, and one that occupies much of the author’s account, is the battle for health-care reform. The book closes before the recent congressional squeaker passing bills in the House and Senate, but the lesson remains the same. The president took terrific pains to involve the Republicans in the enterprise, and the Republicans responded by kicking sand in his face. At countless points during its life, health-care reform seemed dead in the water, but it was helped at the last moment by an incredibly callous move on the part of a California Blue Cross enterprise, which “announced a 39 percent rate hike in the middle of the debate.” Re-energized, Obama spent much of March 2010 mustering his forces and applying pressure so he could get the reform package passed—putting his presidency, Alter notes, as well as the future of the Democratic Party, in jeopardy. Looking into the president’s past, the author portrays Obama as a fighter who sometimes gives the impression that he would rather be doing something else, a peacemaker who isn’t afraid to pressure friends and enemies alike to achieve the larger good, but also as a man who thinks things through well in advance. One of the newsworthy moments comes early in the narrative, with Obama recruiting Hillary Clinton for his Cabinet even as the primaries were still in heated contention. Alter is admiring but not uncritical, rejecting the too-much/too-soon view of some commentators while noting a few missteps.
Politics junkies will find this rewarding, particularly in Alter’s account of the inner workings of the White House and Capitol Hill.Pub Date: May 18, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4391-0119-3
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2010
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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