In a book rich in anecdote and insight, Schultz assays their relationship splendidly.
A perceptive analysis of the evolution of political cultures that infuses a dissection of the contradictions within liberal and conservative thought with revealing character studies.
At the core of this account of rivalry and friendship between William F. Buckley Jr. (1925-2008) and Norman Mailer (1923-2007) is the political excitement of an era gone by, when the radical Mailer and conservative Buckley could spar without allowing substance to be overwhelmed by theater. Schultz (20th Century American History/Univ. of Illinois at Chicago; Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to Its Protestant Promise, 2011) demonstrates how the two men lived remarkably parallel lives as writers and public intellectuals of the 1960s, a confluence begun in 1955, with the birth of Buckley’s National Review and Mailer's Village Voice. What they shared above all was an abiding love of America and a nagging fear of its imminent decay. Both abhorred the hollowness of postwar America, with its devotion to consumerism, corporate capitalism, and stultifying rules of social behavior, though they addressed this malaise quite differently. Schultz exhibits a sense of irony and a knack for telling details. He neither glamorizes nor excuses, exposing the best and worst traits of his subjects, their brilliance and their limitations. As political theorists and activists, they could be vague and they were trenchant. Both feared a totalitarianism of the mind, though Buckley (the salesman), unlike Mailer (the philosopher), had no willingness to shift views if he could be convinced that “his understanding of human nature was wrong.” Where Mailer sought authenticity, Buckley required fealty to the virtues of tradition. From their first public debate in 1962, the loquacious darling of the right and the pugnacious bulldog of the left found they delighted in challenging each other. From that grew a regard that, despite their differences, endured for decades.
In a book rich in anecdote and insight, Schultz assays their relationship splendidly.Pub Date: June 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-393-08871-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
PROFILES
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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