Miller might possess just cause, but one-sided, bitter accounts of her disputes feel unworthy of a talented journalist.
Miller (God Has Ninety-Nine Names: Reporting From a Militant Middle East, 1997, etc.) offers her account of her ignominious departure from the New York Times in 2005 due to her allegedly inaccurate coverage about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Unsurprisingly, the author claims that Times editors, fellow reporters, and various other parties used her as a scapegoat after President George W. Bush and his advisers decided to invade Iraq on the basis of reporting by Miller (as well as various government agency assessments) that the rogue nation posed a danger to the United States. Yes, Miller reveals, she misjudged information provided to her by sources inside and outside Iraq. However, she adds, she did her best to vet her sources in an atmosphere that made separating truth from lies nearly impossible. Along the way to her qualified mea culpa, Miller shares accounts from her four decades of global and domestic journalism. As a memoir of high-stakes journalism, the book is solid. It is especially revealing about why she decided to go to prison for contempt of court rather than reveal a confidential source related to the outing of Valerie Plame, who was secretly employed by the CIA. Prior to her dismissal from the Times, Miller spent 85 days in prison because she felt a professional obligation to honor a promise of source confidentiality. When the author reveals snippets about her personal life, she admirably addresses rumors of romances with powerful men, including a member of Congress. Her occasional references to her late-in-life marriage to book publishing guru Jason Epstein reveal their sometimes-differing viewpoints about domestic life and about reporting risks. Unfortunately, the memoir is marred by frequent score-settling, especially aimed at New York Times editors and publishers.
Miller might possess just cause, but one-sided, bitter accounts of her disputes feel unworthy of a talented journalist.Pub Date: April 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-1601-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
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
PERSPECTIVES
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