A welcome portrait, one from which the famed gadfly’s admirers and foes alike have much to learn.
An eyes-wide-open portrait of “an immensely polarizing figure” whose enemies—Democratic Party loyalists, Big Three stockholders, and Corvair enthusiasts among them—are legion.
Ralph Nader, writes Martin (Greenspan: The Man Behind the Money, 2000), has been a podium-pounding contrarian since at least his student days at Princeton, where he once almost ran over Albert Einstein—and, Martin gamely hints, had his first auto-safety epiphany. As a young Washington-based attorney and sometime freelance journalist, Nader gained early fame for his comprehensive attack on the auto industry, Unsafe at Any Speed, and for a well-coordinated campaign to reform auto-safety laws. That first crusade, Martin writes, “continues to pay dividends”: as many as a million lives may have been saved thanks to Nader’s single-minded efforts. Using the proceeds from his successful suits against Detroit carmakers to fund the consumer-advocacy law group informally dubbed “Nader’s Raiders,” Nader went on to incur the wrath of a host of enemies and to involve himself in dozens of causes, convinced, as he said, both that the “law was an instrument of justice” and that “I was not going to be sharp by becoming narrow.” After spending years “wandering in the policy-wonk desert,” Nader also became increasingly convinced that the major political parties were hopelessly corrupt. He therefore made three quixotic bids for the presidency to gain a forum for his many-sided assault on the status quo, the most recent in 2000, when he ran on the Green Party ticket (without, Martin observes, ever bothering to become a member). That effort unquestionably lost Al Gore the presidency, Martin writes, even though Nader insisted after the fact that Gore defeated himself—and prophesied during the campaign that “George Bush is so dumb, Gore will beat him by twenty points.” Though anathema in a thousand quarters, Nader isn’t through yet.
A welcome portrait, one from which the famed gadfly’s admirers and foes alike have much to learn.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-7382-0563-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Perseus
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
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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