Pearlstine wishes to report what happened; he also wishes to burnish his tarnished armor.
A former editor in chief of Time Inc.—also a principal in the battle between the press and prosecutors in the Valerie Plame case—rehearses and defends his role in the drama.
The generic title misleads a bit: Pearlstine deals mostly with the Plame case (its antecedents, its intricacies) and with the Scooter Libby indictment and trial. But he does focus on some other issues and cases. He wishes that news organizations were more explicit and consistent with their sources; he urges a more common vocabulary. He explores, for example, the differences between anonymous and confidential sources and appends guidelines recently adopted by Time Inc. He believes everyone involved could avoid much pain—ethical, legal, even punitive—if there were more clarity about terms like background and deep background. He takes swift glances at numerous other cases, from Watergate to Janet Cooke (who fabricated prize-winning pieces for the Washington Post), to Dan Rather’s botched story on President Bush’s National Guard service, the CIA secret prisons, NSA eavesdropping, even the embarrassing Sports Illustrated story about the University of Alabama’s new football coach, fired before he ever coached a game for alleged sexual improprieties. But most of these cases are illustrative only. What Pearlstine really wants is to explain his decision to turn over to Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald the notes of Time reporter Matt Cooper at a moment when Judy Miller, the New York Times reporter (who comes in for some harsh treatment here), elected to go to jail instead. Pearlstine says that his was a legal and ethical decision: Time Warner appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which refused to hear the case, so Pearlstine decided to submit to the lower-court’s decision. Thus, Time released its files, Cooper testified and Libby was found guilty. To his credit, Pearlstine quotes his severest critics—and usually resists the urge to counter.
Pearlstine wishes to report what happened; he also wishes to burnish his tarnished armor.Pub Date: July 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-374-22449-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2007
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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