Readable approach to a significant aspect of presidential history that doesn’t always receive the treatment it deserves.
Lively yet overly detailed chronicle of the different paths various presidents have taken once they left the White House.
New York Times contributors Benardo and Weiss (co-authors: Brooklyn by Name, 2006) describe how different chief executives found ways to serve their country—and bank accounts—after their tenure in the nation’s top job. Timed to coincide with the addition of George W. Bush to the Former Presidents’ Club, the book’s narrative style makes it appealing to both general readers and history geeks. While some stories of recent vintage are well known, such as Jimmy Carter’s humanitarian efforts and election monitoring or Bill Clinton’s foundation and lucrative speaking career, the authors shed much light on earlier presidents. They deal at great length with Herbert Hoover’s work as chairman of a commission on government reorganization and John Quincy Adams’s efforts as an abolitionist congressman and defender of the enslaved Africans who mutinied on the Amistad. Benardo and Weiss rarely break new ground, but they admirably synthesize information from disparate sources. Extensively discussing Clinton’s outspoken and sometimes controversial efforts on behalf of his wife during the 2008 Democratic primaries, they clearly think that his actions besmirched the prestige of the presidency. The authors also spend a great deal of time discussing the history and workings of presidential libraries. These efforts by presidents to help shape their legacies have evolved into elaborate public-private ventures. Benardo and Weiss argue that there should be more rigorous scholarship when administering the libraries and more disclosure about donors. “Transparency in such library contributions would help citizens assess whether corporate donations or sovereign governments’ gifts influence a president’s policies,” they write. “A detailed federal budget exists for what taxpayers are providing to presidential libraries across America. Why not demand the same for private contributions?”
Readable approach to a significant aspect of presidential history that doesn’t always receive the treatment it deserves.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-124496-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2008
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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