Capably written and argued, though only the future will tell whether the elegy for the Republican establishment is premature.
A thoughtful political biography of two dynasts of a now-receding generation of politicians.
The title of historian/journalist Updegrove’s (Indomitable Will: LBJ in the Presidency, 2012, etc.) latest comes from George W. Bush’s well-documented lament that the rise of Donald Trump meant that he and his father would be the last “real” Republicans to hold the White House. That worry, suggests the author, is well-founded; by his account, the Bushes are definitively establishment figures who, while of much different styles, represented the virtues of prudence, civility, and bipartisanship as leaders of a party that has lately “placed ideological purity over pragmatism and compromise in governance.” George W. claims that his brother Jeb’s primary defeat at Trump’s hands was the result of anger stemming from “a moribund economy.” If the anger seems more free-floating and less directed than all that, it certainly would seem that disdain marked Jeb’s trouncing in an arena that by all rights he should have dominated. Updegrove discusses the advantages and disadvantages of being a member of a political dynasty in a time when voters seem mistrustful of them—and Trump, he observes, upended two of them, the Bushes and the Clintons—noting that still other Bushes are waiting in the wings for their turns. In the main, this is a solid examination of how the Bushes behaved while in office, the one patrician and the other homespun, the latter much more certain of the righteousness of his cause even after being told by his own mother that he would not prevail in his first run for public office. (“True story,” he shrugged, though Barb proved to be wrong.) In the end, George H.W. emerges as a bit warmer and less wooden than he might have seemed during his term as president, while George W. emerges as somewhat more substantial than he is often depicted as being.
Capably written and argued, though only the future will tell whether the elegy for the Republican establishment is premature.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-265412-0
Page Count: 484
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2017
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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