An intriguing if predictable autobiography by one of the most powerful politicians to have emerged in the past decade, now host of a CBS-TV morning show. Moving from a directionless college grad to being the youngest person ever elected to the New York City Council to a position of leadership in the US Congress, Molinari has been, as she notes, very much “a young woman in a hurry.” Yet she exhibits—and makes a point of the fact here—an ordinariness that both makes her appealing and disguises her intelligence and determination. Born and raised in Staten Island, the daughter of Gus Molinari, whose congressional seat she eventually took over, she became an effective advocate for both the needs and values of that borough. Most entertaining here are her stories of the battles she waged, as the only Republican on the New York City Council, on behalf of her constituents. How she did so, the political strategies and compromises along the way, are the types of detail that make of this book more than simply self-promoting fluff. As a congressional representative, she continued her independent ways. A feminist and pro-choice, she became a “player” in a Republican Party increasingly hostile to both positions. Ideologically unpredictable, she played the political game as well as anyone, never losing the down-to-earth image that made her enormously appealing. Her detailed analysis of the enigma that is Newt Gingrich offers some true insights into the man. We do not, however, get much more than a surface impression of Molinari herself, the contradictions of her political beliefs, the source of her obvious driving ambition. She plays too much on her image of normalcy when she is in many ways anything but normal. The writing talents of Elinor Burkett (The Right Women, p. 90, etc.) no doubt add much to this above-average autobiography. Self-serving in many ways, the book still has much to offer as an examination of how US politics really works. (16 b&w photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: May 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-385-49220-0
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1998
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
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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