Fits well alongside such politico-aspirational books as Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father, and better written than most...
California’s junior senator limbers up “to be a joyful warrior in the battle to come.”
Harris (Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor's Plan to Make Us Safer, 2009, etc.), who recently announced her candidacy for president, follows immediately with an entry in the genre that might be called the Obligatory Campaign Biography, blending how-did-we-get-here memoir with political platform. In that sense, this book is by-the-numbers, with all the expected elements. Yet the author’s background is unusual enough on many scores to set her autobiography apart: She is the first American of Indian or Jamaican descent to serve in the Senate and the first African-American senator from California, having served prominently and sometimes controversially as the state’s attorney general. Countering the whispering birther movement surrounding her early campaign, Harris recounts that she was born in Oakland of mixed descent, with an Indian immigrant mother who “understood very well that she was raising two black daughters” and took pains to “make sure we would grow into confident, proud black women.” The author excelled in school but, she recounts in a moment of reversal, failed her first effort at the bar, overcoming defeat to take a visible role in the Bay Area legal community. Her efforts at judicial reform figure in her timely call for an overhaul of sentencing procedures, all as part of a platform of “what I see as women’s issues: the economy, national security, health care, education, criminal justice reform, climate change.” Harris also reveals a policy-wonk side, enthusiastically addressing issues such as cybersecurity (“a new front in a new kind of battle”) and economic inequality (“with millions of Americans hanging by a thread,” she deftly writes of the current president, “the White House reached for scissors”). The talking points of the book are surely those she’ll be revisiting in speeches and debates to come, and suffice it to say that you can bet Jamie Dimon won’t be endorsing her.
Fits well alongside such politico-aspirational books as Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father, and better written than most in the category.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-56071-5
Page Count: 370
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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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
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
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