Despite some puffery, this is a readable portrait of a remarkable individual.
Inspiring story of a woman who is using her wealth for philanthropy.
At 82, Warren Buffett’s older sister, Doris, has contributed more than $100 million in support of battered women, sick children, the mentally ill and others through a highly personal style of giving that sets her Sunshine Lady Foundation apart from larger organizations staffed with trained professionals. In this admiring account—more tribute than biography—Zitz, a reporter with the Free Lance-Star in Fredericksburg, Va., where Doris Buffett lives, describes her difficult life and her success as a philanthropist since inheriting her mother’s Berkshire Hathaway shares in 1996. Writing with Doris’s cooperation, Zitz tells an upbeat story of charitable giving that has its roots in this bright and attractive woman’s misfortunes. Emotionally abused by a mother who apparently disliked her children, Doris was made to feel stupid and unloved (“I never heard the words ‘I love you,’ ” she writes). She struggled through four disastrous marriages and depression, nearly lost her home in the 1987 stock-market crash, had cancer twice and remains estranged from her children. Now, writes Zitz, she wants “poor children, sick kids and abused women to experience a little happiness” through her targeted gifts that help them weather crises and move ahead on their own. Friends and other nonprofessionals help her vet letters from the needy to select recipients. The book offers intriguing glimpses of young Warren Buffett—he provides a foreword—and describes how Doris became an anti-communist activist and Barry Goldwater supporter in the early ’60s to have something to talk about with her dying father, a Republican Congressman. The author offers moving examples of Doris’s philanthropy and rightly praises her support of prisoner education at Sing Sing and San Quentin prisons, among other causes shunned by most of her peers. Having learned what matters the hard way, she is determined to give all her money away to others who have also been unlucky in life.
Despite some puffery, this is a readable portrait of a remarkable individual.Pub Date: May 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-57962-209-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2010
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
