High-octane politics laid bare.
Political spin doctor lifts the curtain on the global pollster/consultant business.
A political scientist and activist denied tenure at Yale, Greenberg (The Two Americas: Our Current Political Deadlock and How to Break It, 2004, etc.) entered the fray of Washington politics in the 1980s and gained international recognition as part of Bill Clinton’s inner circle. Convinced that the Democrats needed to redesign their party around the needs of a forgotten middle class, he helped propel the Arkansas governor into the White House in 1992. At that moment, Greenberg became the strategist of choice for modernizing politicians around the world. This book recounts his associations with five big names in recent political history. Following two opening chapters on Clinton, Greenberg remembers his life in the political trenches with Nelson Mandela, Tony Blair, Ehud Barak and Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada. He writes about his subjects with honesty rather than sycophancy, though Mandela is treated with considerable awe. In 1993, Greenberg assisted the African National Congress during South Africa’s first democratic elections. Discerning that voters found large political gatherings impersonal, his team connected Mandela to supporters through more intimate forums. The author was then invited to help Tony Blair modernize the British Labour Party in 1995. Blair earned his people’s trust, but struggled to retain it during the Iraq War. Barak hired Greenberg in 1997 to help him defeat Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party and become prime minister of Israel. Despite great obstacles, compounded by his own stubborn streak, Barak brought Israelis around to the idea of a historic peace agreement. Finally, the section on Sánchez de Lozada’s brief tenure as president of Bolivia tries to rebut an award-winning 2005 documentary that lambasted the actions of Greenberg and other American political consultants abroad. This attempt is only partially successful. Defending the pollsters’ role as a mediator between the people and their politicians, Greenberg fails to convince. However, his candor and wide range of experience makes for an illuminating memoir.
High-octane politics laid bare.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-312-35152-6
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2008
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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