A warmly sympathetic biography of a spirited woman.
A first lady who overcame breast cancer and addictions became an inspiration for many Americans.
Former TV news anchor and reporter McCubbin (co-author, with Clint Hill: Five Presidents: My Extraordinary Journey with Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford, 2016, etc.) felt the spirit of Betty Ford (1918-2011) encouraging her as she wrote. “There is little doubt in my mind,” she writes, “that she orchestrated this entire process.” Drawing largely on Ford’s two memoirs and interviews with her children and others close to her, the author fashions an admiring portrait of a woman who faced physical and emotional challenges. A former dancer and model, Betty was a divorced 30-year-old when she married Michigan lawyer Gerald Ford and soon followed him to Washington, D.C., after he won a congressional seat. Being a Washington wife could be difficult: As Jerry’s political responsibilities increased, he traveled constantly, leaving Betty with four active children and the feeling that “the more important her husband became, the less important she was.” Low self-esteem, though, did not keep her from campaigning energetically for Jerry, entertaining, and participating in various clubs and organizations. At home, a full-time housekeeper compensated for a mother who “wasn’t emotionally available” to her children. Despite persistent stage fright, Betty spoke publicly in support of women’s equality, abortion, and even premarital sex, earning praise for her forthright revelation about her bout with breast cancer. In 1964, a pinched nerve caused overwhelming chronic pain, precipitating Betty’s reliance on painkillers, which escalated so dramatically that by 1977, she swallowed handfuls of pills morning and night, along with more than a few drinks. Besides pain, she suffered from depression, which McCubbin does not deeply probe. Although she portrays the couple as deeply devoted, as Betty sank into alcoholism and drug dependency, Jerry refused to confront the problem. Like many families of addicts, different members took on “various codependent roles in order to cope: enabler, hero, scapegoat, lost child, mascot.” Finally overcoming her addictions, Betty went on to co-found a well-regarded treatment center.
A warmly sympathetic biography of a spirited woman.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6468-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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
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