Engaging personal and political history, occasionally vitiated by simplistic and sophomoric interjections.
A former student of the career diplomat and State Department insider intertwines the narrative of Hill’s life with an account of her own experiences with him.
Worthen, who graduated from Yale in 2003, was greatly impressed and intimidated by Hill when she encountered him as a professor. Maybe it was because he’d been involved in everything from Star Wars and Iran-Contra to the memoirs of George Schultz—or maybe it was because he awarded her a C- on her first essay for him during freshman year. She found comfort in his certainty; she enjoyed the way he skewered liberals, whose relativism troubled her. Even before graduation, Worthen had decided to write Hill’s biography and garnered his approval; she actually submitted papers to other professors that dealt in some fashion with his career. Following her departure from Yale, she visited places where Hill had lived; interviewed his former classmates, friends and colleagues; developed relationships with his first wife and two daughters; got to know his second wife. She read every fat and fatuous Reaganite memoir and consulted Hill’s voluminous handwritten notes at the Hoover Institute. The text follows his story from birth to Yale, giving interesting accounts of his service in Hong Kong, Vietnam, Israel, the UN. Periodically, Worthen pauses, shifts to the first person, and tells us about Hill and his Yale classes, especially the Grand Strategy seminar whose metaphorical richness she explores. Some of her commentary is enlightening, some banal. Although she confesses to being “enraptured” at times, she notices cracks on her hero’s fine porcelain surface, some of which run deep, and recognizes the dangers of absolute certainty. Yet Worthen’s admiration for Hill doesn’t disappear; it alters. The emperor may be naked, but that’s not always bad.
Engaging personal and political history, occasionally vitiated by simplistic and sophomoric interjections.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2006
ISBN: 0-618-57467-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2005
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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