A newsworthy book in an electoral cycle that promises to see plenty of foreign interference—and little resistance from...
“Never did I imagine a day when the greatest threats to our institutions would come from within our own government”: A former special agent details just what it is that Donald Trump doesn’t like about the FBI.
Now a CNN analyst, Campbell served as assistant to former FBI director James Comey, among other assignments over a 12-year career. It was in that role that he participated in the operation of his title, its name taken from the Rolling Stones song “Jumping Jack Flash.” It was early on in the 2016 presidential campaign that the Steele report emerged from a British intelligence agent “that contained unverified but explosive charges against then candidate Trump.” In those green times, even a couple of Republican senators worried that the report was worth pursuing, one of them, not coincidentally, John McCain. Comey’s unpleasant task was to report to Trump that the FBI had the information and that he was indeed under investigation for illegal ties to Russia, something Trump has vehemently denied. In the end, he fired Comey and effectively declared war on the FBI for supposedly being against him politically even though, Campbell notes, the agency is apolitical—and, he adds, “one key aspect of law enforcement in this nation that separates us from authoritarian regimes has been the norm that politicians do not interfere in the work of the FBI.” That norm has been destroyed, and even though the Mueller Report, by the author’s account, strongly suggests illegal activity, he writes that Attorney General William Barr, “describing lawfully predicated surveillance as ’spying,’ ” and Trump’s personal attorney, Rudolph Giuliani, are actively blocking for the White House. Campbell notes that he left the agency voluntarily and has no ax to grind, though his principal person of interest is the current occupant of the White House: “I simply hope to illuminate for US citizens the current and lasting consequences of Trump’s attacks on law enforcement.” That he does.
A newsworthy book in an electoral cycle that promises to see plenty of foreign interference—and little resistance from Republicans.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61620-950-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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
PERSPECTIVES
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