Dishy, as policy-wonkish memoirs go, and a pleasure for readers interested in the art of negotiation.
The former secretary of state reflects on the world that has emerged since she left office in 2001.
Following her previous memoir, Madam Secretary, and particularly the self-explanatory Fascism: A Warning (2018), Albright begins by confessing that the end of her tenure as secretary of state found her “a little overcooked.” She was worn out, frazzled, and out of shape from too little home cooking and not enough exercise. Yet, she allows, she didn’t want to retire, so, after ceding her post to Colin Powell, she examined her options: write a memoir, hit the lecture circuit, teach, establish “a small consulting firm, run primarily by women.” Never one to be pinned down to one thing, she did pretty much all of them. She founded that firm, which had a hard take on its mission: Do good, and “whatever the cost to our bottom line, we didn’t want our children to think of us as creeps.” Therefore, no lobbying for big tobacco or the gun lobby, and by her account, Albright and colleagues steered big pharma into a few beneficial measures. The lecture circuit was a touch less satisfying, as was “the endurance test known as a book tour.” But postgame diplomatic analysis turns out to be her thing, always from the perspective of one who understands that diplomacy is the art of persuading “each side to settle for part of what it wants rather than prolong a squabble by demanding all.” Naturally, she despairs at the Trumpian approach, to say nothing of the man himself (“It was one thing to crave change; quite another to choose Donald Trump to define it”). And is he a fascist? Maybe not by dictionary definition, though not for want of trying—and in any event, Albright concludes, “he has the most antidemocratic instincts of any president in modern American history.”
Dishy, as policy-wonkish memoirs go, and a pleasure for readers interested in the art of negotiation.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-280225-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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