Somewhat dated but a nonetheless rich collection framing the kinds of people, fair and foul, destined to make Washington...
Probing profiles and essays from the late Washington Post journalist long recognized for her insights into government’s inner workings.
Williams’s pungent portraits of a panoply of Washington characters reveal raw power robed in an ornate, quaint, social fabric—almost as if the Rome of Tacitus were splashed across Jane Austen’s English countryside. Her favorite targets include hypocrisy, of which there is plenty to burn, and the varieties of low behavior that wind up being a sort of generic lack of grace under pressure. In a chapter entitled “The Hack,” for example, she skewers a California Democrat known for resigning from Congress under investigation and his tendency to backstab rivals with: “Listen to [Tony] Coelho, who pauses only to shoot his army’s wounded on his way off the field . . . it’s not Tony Coelho who will pay for his party’s mistakes.” In another instance, her predilection for psychological insight blooms forth in a comparison of the irrepressibly libidinous (her characterization) black lawyer and “message man,” Vernon Jordan, with his patron, Bill Clinton: “Like Jordan, Clinton is a product of a matriarchal home that propelled him up from the lower middle class. Like Jordan, he is a man skilled at, perhaps addicted to, the seduction of everyone he meets.” And in Ronald Reagan’s ultimately forced explanation of the Iran-Contra situation—“Mistakes were made”—Williams nails the situation as a Washington syndrome: “the self-rescinding apology, which may be the most useful of all.” Other notable chapters include Jeb and Barbara Bush as, respectively, The Sibling and The Wife. The second section comprises essays on life and fate, the most poignant of which is “Hit By Lightning: A Cancer Memoir,” an account of being diagnosed with the cancer that killed her in January 2005.
Somewhat dated but a nonetheless rich collection framing the kinds of people, fair and foul, destined to make Washington tick.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2005
ISBN: 1-58648-363-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2005
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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