Loads of down-and-dirty political fun.
Hillary Rodham Clinton's advance man recounts his adventures as the head staffer responsible for assuring glitch-free traveling appearances for the First Lady.
A political animal since his teenage years, Halley is invited to advance for Hillary before the 1992 presidential election. Initially reluctant to work for a “secondary” (this old hand advances only for principals), the author is lured away from his desk job to plan her swing through New England and finds himself hooked for the next decade. Equal parts event-manager, crowd-builder, public-relations man, and problem-solver, Halley looks for the best photo ops in Argentina, chases yaks in Mongolia, and makes sure that Hillary is never seen in the same place as Fidel Castro when the two of them are booked into the same Swiss hotel. With a story for every location, and an inside look at how the administration responds to major events ranging from the Oklahoma City bombing to the Lewinsky scandal, Halley tells all in a salty, engaging tone of a Boston boy who is still thrilled to have hit the political big time. Working in close proximity to the first family only increases the author's respect for them, though he is most loyal to Hillary; the author displays tempered admiration for the president, but nonetheless engages him in a shoving match when Bill wants to take the stage at a Hillary event before Halley's lighting cues have started. Halley does not exempt himself from the ribbing, gamely relating the time he wound up nude in a Japanese hotel lobby. His real bile, however, is reserved for right-wing crusaders and the mud-slinging they aimed at the Clintons throughout the president's two terms.
Loads of down-and-dirty political fun.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2002
ISBN: 0-670-03111-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2002
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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