No bombshells, but revealing in detail and context.
Ex-presidents from Truman to Clinton: how they coped and carried on, and where they stand today.
Updegrove, a former publisher of Newsweek and president of Time Canada, credits late Time White House correspondent Hugh Sidey for guidance on framing his study of former U.S. presidents in the postwar era. His introduction effectively instills the historical mood: Initially, a national leader’s stepping aside voluntarily in the bloom of health was an unnatural act, simply without precedent or rules, until George Washington set the general hands-off tone for White House retirees. Not long after, however, the once-ineffective John Quincy Adams was essentially drafted back to Washington by congressional voters in his Massachusetts district, served nine successive terms and was an abolitionist force at the time of his death, in 1848. In Quincy Adams, the author sources the thread of “second act” redemption that resonates with the likes of the disgraced Richard Nixon, the undistinguished (in office) Jimmy Carter and even Bill Clinton, who despite leaving with the highest performance rating (65%, besting Ronald Reagan’s 64%) of any postwar president, felt and showed he had a lot of explaining to do. Both Carter, the only ex-president to have been awarded a Nobel Peace Prize, and Nixon, Updegrove observes, “Were able to successfully pursue foreign-policy goals left unfinished.” But there is poignancy as well, for example, in LBJ’s dissipative relapse with cigarettes and booze that contributed to his death at 64—exactly when a computer model had predicted he would die based on family health history; or in Nancy Reagan’s dashed hopes for an Edmund Morris biography that ultimately portrayed her then-failing husband not as a Mt. Rushmore figure but the familiar yet enigmatic “Dutch.” In one priceless vignette, Harry Truman, harried by Bess to mow the lawn, intentionally does it on Sunday morning, to her deep chagrin as passing churchgoers take reproving notice.
No bombshells, but revealing in detail and context.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-59228-942-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2006
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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