Relentlessly positive in tone, Grande's narrative never dives deeply enough to reward readers’ time.
Ronald Reagan’s former personal assistant reminisces.
Grande was a senior at Pepperdine University when she was offered a position as an intern in Reagan’s office in Century City, California. It was the summer of 1989, and Reagan had only been out of office for a few months. The author ended up working for him for 10 years, quickly rising to become executive assistant to the former president. About halfway through her tenure, Reagan was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, and her job evolved to accommodate the former president's declining abilities. By the time she left her post, she was married with three children, and Reagan was no longer able to come into the office at all. From her position, Grande had an unparalleled opportunity to observe Reagan promoting his legacy as a vigorous ex-president and then struggling against a disease that he knew would ultimately force a retirement from public life. She undertook some unusual responsibilities at a relatively early age. Unfortunately, she lacks the objectivity and discernment necessary to produce an insightful view into either Reagan's situation or her own. From the beginning, she was, and remains, utterly star-struck by Reagan; her narrative bubbles over with the reverent enthusiasm of a teenager with a backstage pass to a Justin Bieber concert. Ron and Nancy both appear as paragons of public and private virtue, everyone on their staff always pulled together to achieve logistical miracles, and so forth. The author appears as an appealing character—self-deprecating, gaining in confidence and ability, eager to assist a boss for whom she feels equal parts awe and genuine affection—but her occasional poignant observations about coping with Alzheimer's or maturing in her job are overwhelmed by an onrushing tide of uplifting anecdotes.
Relentlessly positive in tone, Grande's narrative never dives deeply enough to reward readers’ time.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-316-39645-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: Jan. 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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