Intermittently absorbing testimony to the idiosyncratic—and autocratic—management style of the British media baron who was discredited as a swindler after his mysterious death in late 1991, coupled with an apologia that doth protest more than a bit too much. Davies (White Lies, 1991) was foreign editor of London's Daily Mirror when, in 1984, Robert Maxwell gained ownership of the tabloid newspaper and made him a confidant. A constant companion on ``Cap'n Bob'' 's globe-trotting forays, Davies provides tellingly detailed accounts of his boss's boorishly eccentric behavior in venues ranging from Communist chancellories to Tokyo. While the author doesn't claim to have realized that Maxwell was looting the pension funds of publicly traded and privately held enterprises under his control, he leaves little doubt that grandiose ambitions helped drive the financier to the shady side of the street. Davies also adds to the posthumous charges against Maxwell with such plausible if speculative allegations as that his employer laundered money for the KGB through Liechtenstein trusts. He further argues that Maxwell ran afoul of America's Mafia as a result of attempting to cut distribution costs at N.Y.C.'s Daily News (his last takeover). Rather late in the game, Davies gets around to addressing charges leveled by Seymour Hersh in The Samson Option (1991) that he himself had been an arms dealer and that Maxwell was an agent of Israel's Mossad. Davies (who endorses the consensus view that Maxwell committed suicide rather than face exposure as a common crook) pooh-poohs the notion that his former boss was an intelligence operative, while copping what will strike many as an unpersuasive plea on his own behalf. Vivid, occasionally axe-grinding, vignettes that contribute a modicum of depth to the still incomplete portrait of an apparently world-class villain. (Photos—eight pp.—not seen)
Pub Date: May 20, 1993
ISBN: 0-312-09249-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
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
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