Tabloid-style gossip about the senior senator from Massachusetts. David (coauthor, Bobby Kennedy, 1986, etc.) has been a Kennedy watcher for 30 years, but his breathless tone here suggests that he's only just discovered that controversial family. While the Kennedys are known for embodying achievement, charm, herculean power, and greed, very little of this is conveyed in David's one- sentence paragraphs as they dart from crisis to quarrel to bottle to bed. David jumps immediately into his subject's head (`` `What the hell is that guy jabbering about?' Ted Kennedy wondered as he listened to the announcer's frenetic shouting, mingled with snatches of prayer, on the car radio''). After some disjointed scene-setting, we learn that Robert Kennedy has just been shot, making Ted the Kennedy heir apparent. This sort of swirling melodrama goes on throughout, leveling events so that details like the African mahogany selected for RFK's coffin bulks as large as the slain senator's evolution from Redbaiter to fierce liberal. Minutiae abounds—which hotel, what island, which celebrity, what boat—although there are excursions into deeper history, such as the first arrival on American soil of a Kennedy, ``a brawny lad named Patrick, who stepped off a packet boat in 1849 with a suitcase tied with a rope and about a hundred dollars in his pocket.'' Given the value of a hundred dollars at that time, one wonders why Patrick so rigidly rationed his food as to be ``close to starvation''—but rather than explain, David instead gives us what everyone knows—from excessive drinking to Chappaquiddick. We also learn a lot about Jackie O. and Onassis, but nothing new about the senator and how he has earned the respect of fellow legislators of both political parties. Good subject, bad treatment.
Pub Date: May 1, 1993
ISBN: 1-55972-167-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Birch Lane Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1993
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
PERSPECTIVES
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