Personal reflections and policy proposals from the minority leader of the House of Representatives. Gephardt (D-Missouri) is something of an anomaly within his party these days in that he actually sounds like a Democrat. He is pro-union, admits to being a liberal, thinks government has a positive role to play in the lives of American citizens, and doesn’t much like the policies of the Republicans. Yet as partisan as he is, he decries what he terms “the politics of personal destruction,” the vindictive war of innuendo and accusation between the two major parties that has been going on in Congress since the time of Watergate. Citizens, he fears, now view politics as little more than “gladiatorial entertainment” and so see little value in participating in the political process. Gephardt sounds sincere when he states that he believes such cynicism can be overcome and enumerates several ways in which cooperatively we can all make America an even better place. Unfortunately, he does not go into much detail on what specifically we all might do. Though he covers a number of important policy areas—from labor relations to health care, foreign trade to schooling—his recommendations are safely vague, his arguments underdeveloped. He is perhaps most effective when he ties his own son’s battle with cancer to the need for health-care coverage for all Americans, but sums up what might be done in a single sentence suggesting that tax credits for small businesses could help. Assisted by former aide Wessel, Gephardt writes clearly and accessibly; it’s regrettable that he seems to feel the need to oversimplify in order to reach a wide audience. Not bad, as books by politicians go. Gephardt does seem to truly care about where America is headed. However, he’s ambiguous as to just where that might be. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: June 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-891620-16-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 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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