It would have been nice to see clips from his Hollywood career, but those who miss the political Ronald Reagan will find the...
To mark the Reagan centenary in 2011, Simon and Schuster is re-releasing the 40th president’s 1990 memoir in several formats, including this enhanced electronic edition.
While this format is up-to-the-minute, the prose and multimedia accompanying it (17 video clips, courtesy of CBS News) are firmly 20th century in origin and outlook. Famous for his sunny disposition, which seemingly spread to the nation like an infectious disease during his two terms in the 1980s, Reagan’s memoir reads like a series of screen treatments for Capra-esque movies starring the author as, alternately, a Jimmy Stewart–like stumbling naïf, and a Gary Cooper–ish man of quiet strength who shoots from the hip and speaks nothing but the plain truth. The videos complement this carefully crafted Reagan image, beginning with his elegiac address to the 1992 Republican convention in which he catalogued the momentous events he had witnessed in his eight decades: two World Wars, the Great Depression, a seething Cold War and the summits he took part in to end it. The clips, including several portions of fawning interviews over the years with Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes, show Reagan in his white Stetson, on his Rancho del Cielo, staring soulfully into First Lady Nancy’s eyes, and doing the political job he always did best: making speeches to adoring audiences who hung on his every word.
It would have been nice to see clips from his Hollywood career, but those who miss the political Ronald Reagan will find the enhanced e-book a suitably worshipful souvenir.Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4391-4148-9
Page Count: -
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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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