Here, deposed Navajo tribal chairman MacDonald, convicted last fall of corruption, tells (with the aid of Schwarz—The Hillside Strangler, etc.) his side of the story. As an autobiography of a contemporary Native American, his tale is absorbing; as an exploration of guilt, it is an exercise in finger-pointing and excusatory moral relativism. MacDonald's rise to naat'aannii, or leader, of the 200,000 Navajo in Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico is also an interesting look at the history, culture, and organization of the tribe. Educated in Bureau of Indian Affairs schools, MacDonald drifted from job to job and was once an apprentice medicine man. Eventually trained as an electrical engineer, he left his job at Hughes Aircraft in 1963 to head the Office of Navajo Economic Opportunity, which led to his election in 1970 as tribal chairman. An effective leader and shrewd businessman, he garnered good deals for the tribe's oil, coal, and gas, and managed extensive improvements in roads, sewers, and housing. However, his ``imperial chairmanship'' brought charges of corruption as early as 1977. The Hopi-Navajo land disputes and his bitter feud with Barry Goldwater (who, MacDonald claims, tried to have him killed in 1976) culminated in vicious infighting and the death of two of his followers. By the late 1980's, MacDonald's penchant for hot tubs, BMWs, and chartered planes and his involvement in a multimillion-dollar land deal led to a Senate investigation. Despite admitting his acceptance of ``gifts'' from ``friends,'' and despite his own son's testimony against him, MacDonald claims here that the Senate committee ``deliberately framed him''by withholding evidence. His overvaluation by $7 million of the ``Big Bo'' ranch was ``just the way good old boys play the Arizona real estate game,'' and his acceptance of cash payments was ``no different from those of many U.S. congressional representatives and senators.'' Perversely fascinating, but MacDonald's painting himself as a victim of history and politics will convince few. (Twenty-one pages of photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: July 31, 1991
ISBN: 1-56129-093-9
Page Count: 488
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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