A big, wonderfully readable tale certain to delight political junkies.
A winning memoir from a high-end consultant to Democratic presidential candidates.
Shrum, now a senior fellow at NYU, recalls three and a half decades in the political game, where he started out in 1970 as the wunderkind 26-year-old speechwriter for New York Mayor John Lindsay and then became a top and sometimes controversial strategist for a string of unsuccessful presidential hopefuls, from George McGovern and Dick Gephardt to Al Gore and John Kerry. “Sooner or later, your luck is bound to change,” said Ted Kennedy. It never did. But what a ride: After the Georgetown debate team and Harvard Law, he plunged into politics and began crafting the main Democratic messages of our time. Writing with engaging candor, he describes the rise of modern political consulting, offering incisive snapshots of such notables as Edmund Muskie, the doom and gloomer; Jimmy Carter, of the “empty pieties”; and the existential John Kerry. We see Shrum talking theology with Mario Cuomo, advising Bill Clinton in the Lewinsky scandal and enlisting Warren Beatty to help convince McGovern to remove a Ralph Waldo Emerson quote from the end of a speech. (“Look, George, you can’t do this,” said Beatty. “It would be like making love to a beautiful woman…and then at the last minute pulling out and saying, ‘I’ll let Ralph finish for me.’ ”) There are countless bright stories about friends (Hunter S. Thompson, Pamela Harriman and Larry Tribe) and many clients who won election to the U.S. Senate. The book brims with speechwriting tips: Offend no one and you persuade no one. Beware of lines that sound too good not to be used—rhetoric can outpace reality. Like a symphony, he writes, a good political speech rises and rouses the audience, then falls to a quieter level, “transfixing the listeners instead of eliciting applause.”
A big, wonderfully readable tale certain to delight political junkies.Pub Date: June 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-7432-9651-9
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2007
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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