By turns absorbing, self-pitying, and intentionally (and unintentionally) amusing, former New York State chief judge Wachtler's memoir recounts a journey through hell—a prison term for charges stemming from attempted extortion, harassment, and kidnapping threats made against his former lover, socialite Joy Silverman, and her daughter. Wachtler is certainly entitled to criticize inequities he first discussed as a judge and then experienced as an inmate while serving 12 months in two federal prisons in North Carolina and Minnesota. These include mandatory jail sentences, draconian treatment for first-time drug offenders, dehumanizing strip searches, and overcrowded, violent prisons. One quality for which Wachtler won praise as a judge—his writing skill—is shown to best advantage in stories about fellow inmates, a group consisting of spies, Mafia kingpins, drug addicts, counterfeiters, and robbers. In his shock at his vertiginous fall from power, Wachtler echoes Sherman McCoy in his friend Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities. But it is his version of what brought him so low, not of what transpired in prison, that contains more spin than conviction. He writes that prescription-drug-induced manic-depression sparked his campaign against Silverman after their relationship ended, but doesn't explain why this didn't seem to affect his judicial performance. He attacks Michael Chertoff, the US attorney who prosecuted him, for seeking jail when an ``order of protection'' and mandated psychological treatment would have supposedly sufficed. Moreover, he cannot understand why Silverman went straight to the FBI about this case instead of simply asking him to stop. This is literally a case of ``blaming the victim,'' since one finds in Linda Wolfe's 1994 Double Life (an account otherwise hostile to Silverman) that Silverman did have her lawyer urge Wachtler to cease the harassment, only to have the judge deny everything, then escalate the threats. While compulsively readable, this confession conceals as much as it reveals, reeking more of resentment at the criminal justice system Wachtler once served than of repentance toward his victim. (Author tour)
Pub Date: April 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-679-45653-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1997
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
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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