Useful reading for those in a similar position, whether in the public or private sector, and a strong case for better...
Entrepreneur and philanthropist Solomont writes of her tour of duty as the wife of the U.S. ambassador to Spain and Andorra—an unpaid position, she pointedly notes, but a full-time one.
When Barack Obama appointed Alan Solomont to represent the U.S. before the governments of Spain and Andorra in 2009, the author stepped into a “diminutive role of ‘ambassador’s spouse.’ ” At the ambassadorial equivalent of boot camp, each student was given a thick binder full of information about all the ambassadors in training, but it included nothing about their spouses. What was immediately clear was that those spouses were not allowed to work while in service, leaving unwelcome gaps in their employment history and Social Security contributions, all because of the potential for conflict of interest. “Acquiescence is not in my DNA,” writes the author. “If there wasn’t a meaningful role for me to fill—something that would allow me to put my own skills and intelligence to work—then I would create one.” The role she created included helping Spanish olive growers develop branding strategies, mentoring women in business, and, in the end, becoming “somewhat of a mini maven when it comes to Spain, learning everything I could about the country.” Meanwhile, she recounts, her husband helped forge a stronger relationship between the U.S. and the Spanish government, especially by developing a friendship with King Juan Carlos, whom the ambassador gave credit for the “leadership and vision” that allowed the nation to emerge from under the shadow of the long Franco dictatorship. Although her protestations against State Department policies regarding spouses come too frequently and repetitively, it is clear that Solomont made the most of the opportunities presented by “the mixed blessing of a relatively blank slate.”
Useful reading for those in a similar position, whether in the public or private sector, and a strong case for better defining the roles of diplomatic spouses, to say nothing of paying them for their work.Pub Date: March 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63331-030-8
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Disruption Books
Review Posted Online: April 8, 2019
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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