Still-raw material that could be of use to Pelosi’s next biographer.
By-the-numbers bio of the Speaker of the House.
Former San Francisco Chronicle Washington bureau chief Sandalow seems unsure whether to like, dislike or fear Nancy Pelosi, whose career he has been covering since 1987 (though, by his account, whom he first met only in 1993). “I have had a hot and cold relationship with Pelosi,” he writes. Apparently Madam Speaker returns the favor, for this is an unauthorized biography chockablock with imagined conversations and scenes that speak to lack of access, unless he were hiding under her bed when the call from the White House came to congratulate her on her election to the nation’s third in command. We will never know. Admittedly, Sandalow notes, Pelosi disdains the press; her attitude probably won’t be improved by this too often ham-fisted piece, with all its unnecessary flourishes (does anyone need to be reminded that San Francisco was home to beatniks?) and choppy paeans to Pelosi’s legendary multitasking abilities (“Each day was a logistical labyrinth. Carpools. Fund raising letters. School plays. Donor meetings. Birthday parties. Printing deadlines. Teacher meetings. Slate cards. Soccer practice. School supplies. Voter files. Press calls. Homework. Thank you notes. Fund raising dinners. Field trips”). Sandalow slowly rises to the occasion as he writes of the impress of Pelosi’s past—born into one political family, married into another—on a career that took off after her first run for political office at the age of 47 and that rapidly led her to one of the most powerful positions in government. Sandalow appreciates his subject’s toughness but sometimes seems not to understand it; there were reasons she endorsed Jack Murtha over Steny Hoyer as her lieutenant, for instance, just as there were reasons for her party to vote Hoyer in instead—and reasons for Pelosi to profess that she was “not a person who has regrets” in the wake.
Still-raw material that could be of use to Pelosi’s next biographer.Pub Date: May 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59486-807-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Rodale
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2008
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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