Despite its flaws, a dark, damning and entertaining account from the campaign trenches.
A former “political opposition specialist” for high-profile Republicans recounts the sordid story of his evolution from right-wing political hit man to unrepentant centrist.
For more than a decade, Marks was “Oppo Man,” the go-to guy for Republicans who wanted dirt on their opponents. His job was to dig up damaging information on his clients’ political opposition and deliver it to pollsters, who figured out which bits would be most damaging in the public mind and then fed them to the media. Among Marks’s greatest hits: helping elect (and re-elect) George W. Bush as Texas governor in 1994 and 1998 and as president in 2000 and 2004; helping North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms defeat Harvey Gantt in 1996; and orchestrating the Republican juggernaut in Texas in 1998. His “right wing political beliefs began to crack,” he writes, during the 1996 presidential campaign, when neither Bob Dole nor Jack Kemp was able to attack Bill Clinton for his philandering because both had a history of adultery. By the time of Clinton’s impeachment, in the author’s opinion, “the Republican Party was weak because it was rotting from the inside, collapsing from the weight of its own flagrant hypocrisy.” Unfortunately, Marks is not as adept at examining his own actions as he is at condemning those of others; he makes brief mention of his womanizing and work for corrupt clients like Jack Abramoff but seems reluctant to draw any insights from those experiences. And his late adoption of centrist politics is a bit of a mystery: He expounds at length about his realization that the Republicans are ethically “just as bad” as the Democrats, but glosses over the political reasons for his transformation with a few brief remarks about the “extremism” of both the left and right wings of American politics.
Despite its flaws, a dark, damning and entertaining account from the campaign trenches.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4022-0854-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2007
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
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
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