What does the Bush Restoration mean for the rest of us? Stay tuned, but consult Phillips for some disturbing scenarios that...
A corrupt dynasty founded on conquest, lies, and the certainty that ruler equals divine agent. Ancient China? Imperial Rome?
No, argues onetime Republican Party operative and latter-day liberal firebrand Phillips (William McKinley, p. 849, etc.): it’s now installed in Washington, by way of Connecticut and Texas. The power of the Bush dynasty, writes Phillips, extends for four generations, and its scions have been intimately involved in three of the 20th century’s chief growth industries: intelligence, energy, and national security. “If there are other families who have more fully epitomized and risen alongside the hundred-year emergence of the US military-industrial complex, the post-1945 national security state, and the 21st-century imperium,” he writes, “no one has identified them.” Fudging the truth, whether over the release of Iranian hostages or the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, is an essential skill in such an enterprise, Phillips argues, and the Bushes (and their Walker kin) are masters of deception. Clandestine skills, money laundering, and perhaps even election fixing also figure heavily on the family résumé, as do other talents essential to covert action but useless in nation building and humane governance. The latest Bush, the author suggests, is the most unsettling of the lot: bound up in the family’s trademark concerns, he also brings to the table a fundamentalist, millenarian view of history and a strong belief that his present station in life is divinely ordained. It is no small irony to discover that the majority of Muslims in the US voted for Dubya. It is also exceptionally meaningful that Bush’s mainstream core is made up of Bible-thumpers; Phillips characterizes the Bush coalition as “a narrowly Armageddon-believing electorate”—of no small significance to an administration bent on continued warfare in the Middle East (save Saudi Arabia, where its interests lie) in the name of good vs. evil.
What does the Bush Restoration mean for the rest of us? Stay tuned, but consult Phillips for some disturbing scenarios that bode ill for the future of good old-fashioned democracy.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2004
ISBN: 0-670-03264-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2003
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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