More of the same from the outspoken Southerner.
More chuckly preaching from the former Arkansas governor and Fox News weekly show host.
Having run for president in 2008 and lost the Republican nomination, Huckabee (Dear Chandler, Dear Scarlett: A Grandfather's Thoughts on Faith, Family, and the Things that Matter Most, 2012, etc.) sounds like he is going to try again, and he presents his clear delineation in ideology between the views of “Bubble-ville” (the “nerve centers” of New York, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles) and “Bubba-ville”—the rest of the country. While residents of the former are among his best friends, of course, even if they hate guns, eat kale and embrace gay marriage, the latter group includes his homegrown buddies, those who cherish their guns for hunting and self-defense, attend church and find Miley Cyrus’ contortions shocking. In the name of “decency,” Huckabee sees the country going down the tubes with the politically correct thought police stifling free expression (e.g., “illegal aliens” have become nonoffensive “dreamers”), former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg trying to take away the Big Gulp, National Security Agency revelations that demonstrate how we are becoming more like China in terms of surveillance and rights’ suppression (while China is becoming more like us in terms of capitalist acquisition), TSA officials patting down toddlers in airports, and the general Democrat-driven overloading of regulation and taxation that is, for example, sending California’s small-business owners to Texas. While the author is fond of declaring that people just want to be left alone, he has to admit that certain members of his own party are ruining it for the rest of them—e.g., conservatives attacking other conservatives for not being conservative enough. Huckabee also skewers the Republicans who supported the TARP bailout of banks and offers a populist, bottom-up economic approach to empowering the regular, God-centered folk.
More of the same from the outspoken Southerner.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-06099-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2014
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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