An object lesson in misguided tell-all writing: A woman hounded by the media while raising an infant fathered by a cheating...
The proximate cause of John Edwards’ political unraveling has a few scores to settle.
Hunter occupied the center of the oddest sideshow of the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign: That summer, reports emerged that she had a child with the North Carolina senator, sparking months of denials (including a campaign staffer’s false claim that he was the father). Hunter’s clumsily written memoir is an extended exercise in blame assignment: Edwards’ friends and campaign aides for being greedy, careerist, and manipulative; Edwards’ wife for being a bully; and Edwards himself for being, as she told him at their first fateful meeting, “so hot!” To avoid furtive trysts as their affair deepened, she was hired to film Edwards’ travels for online “webisodes.” Hunter expresses an almost total disinterest in the politics she covered, and on the road, she rained contempt on nearly everybody surrounding the candidate. (In one instance, she recalls “some poverty woman who was really snotty to me.”) Hunter reserves her deepest fury for Edwards’ wife, Elizabeth, who’s portrayed cartoonishly, forever screaming at her cowering husband. That Elizabeth’s outrage might be justified by her husband’s philandering seems to entirely escape Hunter, who rationalizes her status as a mistress by claiming that the Edwards’ marriage was loveless and sexless. (Elizabeth’s death from cancer in 2010 hardly softens her tone.) The flimsy prose, peppered with all-caps exclamations and high school-age sarcasm, grows even more tedious in the later chapters, as the author chronicles legalistic parrying over who paid how much to whom out of which accounts. The mood is lightened by photos of Hunter and Edwards with their daughter, Quinn, but a seething sense of superiority and entitlement persists.
An object lesson in misguided tell-all writing: A woman hounded by the media while raising an infant fathered by a cheating man manages to render herself unsympathetic.Pub Date: June 22, 2012
ISBN: 978-193785640-3
Page Count: 247
Publisher: BenBella
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2012
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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