In just 150 pages, Zelizer manages to effectively analyze how Carter’s personality has led him to both failure and success.
Zelizer (History and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.; Arsenal of Democracy: The Politics of National Security—From World War II to the War on Terrorism, 2009, etc.) insightfully examines the 39th president.
Jimmy Carter’s presidency, from 1977 to 1981, is often portrayed by historians as a failure. In this brief biography, the author acknowledges Carter’s shortcomings as president, but he points out the largely forgotten fact that he was enormously popular during his first year in office. With the Watergate scandal still fresh, the American people were looking for a change, an anti-Nixon; in many ways, Carter fit the bill perfectly. Carter’s outsider status—he was a relatively young governor of Georgia, untainted by national politics—worked to his advantage, particularly during his presidential campaign. He was a moderate but idealistic Democrat who was uncomfortable with ideological labels, and was willing to take on the establishment to do what he thought was right. But some of these very same qualities worked against Carter when he took office. He often found it difficult to compromise and struggled to muster the support of his own fractious Democratic Party, let alone Republicans. At the same time, the seemingly intractable hostage crisis in Iran, soaring oil prices and the troubled economy would have presented huge challenges to any president. Zelizer points out that although his few major achievements in office were impressive—in particular, the brokering of a peace between Egypt and Israel and the creation of a comprehensive, conservation-based national energy policy—Carter’s style of antiestablishment leadership simply didn’t translate well to Washington, resulting in a chronic inability to get things done. But once he left office, his fearless determination to do the right thing led to his greatest successes: in particular, his founding of the Carter Center, an independent diplomatic institution that has successfully monitored elections around the world, and his charitable work building houses with Habitat for Humanity.
In just 150 pages, Zelizer manages to effectively analyze how Carter’s personality has led him to both failure and success.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8050-8957-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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