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
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier...
A moving record of Didion’s effort to survive the death of her husband and the near-fatal illness of her only daughter.
In late December 2003, Didion (Where I Was From, 2003, etc.) saw her daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, hospitalized with a severe case of pneumonia, the lingering effects of which would threaten the young woman’s life for several months to come. As her daughter struggled in a New York ICU, Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, suffered a massive heart attack and died on the night of December 30, 2003. For 40 years, Didion and Dunne shared their lives and work in a marriage of remarkable intimacy and endurance. In the wake of Dunne’s death, Didion found herself unable to accept her loss. By “magical thinking,” Didion refers to the ruses of self-deception through which the bereaved seek to shield themselves from grief—being unwilling, for example, to donate a dead husband’s clothes because of the tacit awareness that it would mean acknowledging his final departure. As a poignant and ultimately doomed effort to deny reality through fiction, that magical thinking has much in common with the delusions Didion has chronicled in her several previous collections of essays. But perhaps because it is a work of such intense personal emotion, this memoir lacks the mordant bite of her earlier work. In the classics Slouching Toward Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979), Didion linked her personal anxieties to her withering dissection of a misguided culture prey to its own self-gratifying fantasies. This latest work concentrates almost entirely on the author’s personal suffering and confusion—even her husband and daughter make but fleeting appearances—without connecting them to the larger public delusions that have been her special terrain.
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier writing.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4314-X
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
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