A haunting evocation of the fire-and-ice political partnership between Robert and John F. Kennedy—and of how, despite energy and idealism, the brothers encountered tragedy by blundering into “a trackless wood of ambition and emotion.” Bobby was protector, prod, and conscience to his brother—and, he came to fear later, the unwitting agent of JFK’s assassination, according to Mahoney (JFK: Ordeal in Africa, not reviewed), a former John F. Kennedy Scholar at the Univ. of Massachusetts and the Kennedy Presidential Library. The brothers gave a hint of their later relationship in the 1950s, when Jack coolly served on the McClellan Committee investigating corrupt unions while Bobby, as committee counsel, pursued Jimmy Hoffa. While Jack provided the savoir faire, Bobby supplied the moral passion and energy. The brothers shared a disregard for risks that they inherited from father Joe—who, Mahoney alleges, secured the Mafia’s financial support and vote-getting strength in Chicago at a crucial juncture in the 1960 presidential campaign. But as attorney general, Bobby launched an assault on the underworld, hoping not only “to rid the country of its pernicious influence, but also to sever its connection to the Kennedy family,” in Mahoney’s words. Compounding the Mob’s rage was the fact that the administration was simultaneously employing kingpins like Johnny Rosselli in Operation Mongoose against Fidel Castro. Mahoney has assiduously plumbed a host of sources to re-create the web of circumstance that put the Kennedys in the sights of their enemies (who also numbered J. Edgar Hoover and, after the Cuban missile crisis, anti-Castro rebels). But he’s particularly eloquent in depicting the later Bobby: suspicious that the CIA or its minions had killed his brother, then redirecting his crusading energies away from the personal vendettas that may have boomeranged against Jack and toward impassioned advocacy of blacks, migrant workers, Native Americans, and anyone at the margins of society. A graceful dual biography that demonstrates why the questions lingering after their murders are as enduring as the Kennedys” magic.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-55970-480-2
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1999
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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