Disingenuous candor is not unknown in works like this, but Peterson’s memoir is persuasive and lucid.
Sagacious octogenarian and genial plutocrat Peterson (Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It, 2004, etc.) recalls his journey from Kearney, Neb., to the White House and Wall Street.
During the Depression, the author, then a young scion of hardworking Greek immigrants, tended the cash register in the family restaurant. Soon the bright lad was off to MIT and then to Northwestern’s business school. As a young go-getter in a gray flannel suit, he found a natural place in advertising with a prominent Chicago agency. He quickly moved into management at Bell and Howell, where he created the boombox. An open-minded Republican, he entered the world stage as Nixon’s adviser on international trade policy and then secretary of commerce in the early ’70s. He became a member of corporate boards, study groups and think tanks. Then Wall Street beckoned, and Peterson took charge of Lehman Brothers. He later co-founded the Blackstone Group, leaving it as a billionaire. His life story epitomizes the American Dream, as our earnest autobiographer tells it, and no wonder, since he freely confesses to “troublesome traits” like “perfectionism and obsessive devotion to work.” Of course, Peterson’s life wasn’t entirely unproblematic, fraught as it was with brain surgery, two divorces and Richard Nixon. He covers all of these, offering frank appreciation of friends (like Henry Kissinger and David Rockefeller) and candid assessment of foes (Chuck Colson). The author remains devoted to family—he’s now married to Joan Ganz Cooney, who helped create Sesame Street—and to public service.
Disingenuous candor is not unknown in works like this, but Peterson’s memoir is persuasive and lucid.Pub Date: June 8, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-55603-3
Page Count: 364
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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