An average political memoir containing strong speculation that her next action will be a bid for the White House.
A memoir suggesting that if there are problems within the Trump administration, the problem is not Trump.
As a tea party candidate who became governor of South Carolina, Haley (Can’t Is Not an Option: My American Story, 2012) first established herself as a political star on the rise—young, female, and minority, all areas where the Republican Party had been perceived as weakest. With the election of Trump, she was recruited to become the United Nations ambassador, though her governorship hadn’t involved any foreign diplomacy, nor did her straight-shooting demeanor as a self-described “badass” suggest a diplomatic personality, nor had she supported Trump during the primary campaign. Thus, the most remarkable part of this memoir, in contrast to the onslaught of Trump exposés, is her account of how well she worked with the president, how they established a relationship based on mutual respect and trust, how she was able to disagree with him without drawing his ire, and how she was able to leave her U.N. post on good terms. If others had problems with this president, she suggests it was their fault. Her memoir generated plenty of pre-publication publicity for its accounts of her skirmishes with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and her allegation that he and John Kelly had attempted to enlist her in a conspiracy to circumvent the president’s policies. “Whether they sincerely believed they were doing the right thing or just pushing their personal agendas, these people were dangerous,” writes Haley. By contrast, you always knew where you stood with the president, or at least she felt she did. Because of their “open and honest communication,” she writes, “in an administration in which so many people’s negative relationship with the president was their undoing, my relationship with President Trump was a positive. Our styles were different, but we were both fundamentally disrupters of the status quo. And we were both action-oriented.”
An average political memoir containing strong speculation that her next action will be a bid for the White House.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-26655-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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SEEN & HEARD
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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