This eye-opening biography, drawing from rich behind-the-scenes knowledge, is necessary reading for anyone who wants to...
A biography of German Chancellor Angela Merkel (b. 1954) that provides insight and clarity into Germany's often underreported role in shaping the European political landscape.
In his retelling of the trajectory of Merkel's career path, Qvortrup (Political Science/Coventry Univ.) highlights differences in cross-Atlantic political culture in ways no news account can. The daughter of a Lutheran minister in communist East Germany, Merkel was a prizewinning student in mathematics and languages who went on to complete a doctorate in quantum chemistry. Only with the collapse of communism and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 did she enter the political arena. Her rise to political prominence was rapid and dramatic. As an emerging politician in the East, she won sponsorship from leaders in the West, among them Helmut Kohl, who served as chancellor from 1982 to 1998. Male chauvinist opponents derisively called her “Kohl's little girl,” but they learned one among many such lessons when she successfully overthrew Kohl as party leader in a corruption scandal. Qvortrup makes clear that the qualities of character she brought to bear were significant; her rise was not just a result of the good fortune of being in the right place at the right time or knowing the right people. As chancellor, the author demonstrates, Merkel has shown a meticulous attention to detail and “obsession with getting the facts right” that can be traced back to her childhood: when she was 9, her motto was “never show incompetence.” Merkel combined those qualities with ruthless courage in seizing opportunities as she became head of her party and then the government. Consolidating power in Europe's strongest country, she also became the continent's major political leader. Qvortrup outlines both the depth and flexibility of a mind and character unbound by the limits of ideology.
This eye-opening biography, drawing from rich behind-the-scenes knowledge, is necessary reading for anyone who wants to broaden his or her perspective on the world today.Pub Date: July 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4683-1316-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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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