Under Reagan, recently all but canonized, the economy suffered, big government grew bigger, the military got new toys but...
The Reagan years were a triumph of the imagination indeed—and a defeat of reality. So suggests presidential biographer Reeves (President Nixon, 2001, etc.), who offers a different Ronald Reagan from that of the hagiographers.
Reeves’s Reagan is sharper than he is given credit for, aware that ideas—not facts—are important, and that assuring words are even more so. Thus, when Jimmy Carter decried the national crisis of confidence in 1979, Reagan was there to say, “I find nothing wrong with Americans,” implying that the crisis was the Democrats. Entering office with just half the vote, Reagan, an ideologue posing as moderate, immediately set about fulfilling four goals: reducing taxes, strengthening the military, containing communism and restoring national pride. Reducing taxes, Reeves shows, meant massive giveaways to the rich; strengthening the military meant running the deficit up to historic levels; containing communism meant the dirty adventurism of Iran-Contra. But some sort of pride was restored, a blind trust that allowed Reagan a pass no matter what his errors. Thus, though fully two-thirds of respondents to a Washington Post poll believed that Reagan was lying about what he knew about said Iran-Contra, “his overall job approval was recorded at 53 percent.” By Reeves’s account, Reagan—at turns earthy, remote and ill-tempered, used to treating even friends as hired hands—could do all manner of wrong and never be called to answer for it. Even his conservative base turned on him when he made one embarrassing error too many, in this instance by failing to respond to the downing of KAL 007. Yet he survived and more, outlasting many a lieutenant against whom he looked quite reasonable (think Al Haig) and even making historical points for his dealings with Gorbachev.
Under Reagan, recently all but canonized, the economy suffered, big government grew bigger, the military got new toys but not better soldiers or leaders. And as for national pride…Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-3022-1
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2005
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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