A hagiographic authorized bio of New Jersey's governor, by her personal friend. There can be little pretense of objectivity in a political biography , like this one (the second this year after Sandy McClure's Christy Whitman for the People), which is introduced by the subject: In her rather self-satisfied introduction, Whitman tells about the values of honesty and leadership learned in her wealthy, politically oriented Republican upbringing in rural New Jersey. The author traces Whitman's lineage back to her 17th- century New Jersey forebears, particularly profiling her public- spirited grandfather, John Todd. Then Beard relates more than one is likely to want to know about Whitman's sometimes idyllic, sometimes turbulent childhood on her family's farm; one is even treated to descriptions of home movies featuring Whitman, stories of her foxhunting, and detailed analyses of the dynamics of her parents' relationships. Beard shows the politically charged atmosphere in which Whitman grew up: Her parents, both prominent Republicans, were Eisenhower supporters, although her father was a close friend of Adlai Stevensons. Whitman was early exposed to the excitement of Republican conventions and the trauma of a divided party in 1964, when Goldwater's radical conservatism alienated establishment Republicans like Whitman's father. Although politically aware and active before her 1974 marriage to John Whitman, afterward she devoted herself primarily to her family until her 1982 election to the Somerset County Board of Freeholders. After success there and on the Board of Public Utilities, she ran against and almost beat the highly popular incumbent senator, Bill Bradley, and in 1993, running largely on a platform of tax reform, went on to beat Jim Florio for governor. One would be naive to expect a hard-hitting critique of Whitman or her policies from this adulatory tract. Still, an appealing human portrait emerges of one of the nation's most eminent governors.
Pub Date: July 17, 1996
ISBN: 0-06-018361-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1996
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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