After reading this, voters may find no compelling reason to support Jeb, either.
Bush 2008? Anyone who worries at the prospect will want to have a look at this partial—and revealing—portrait.
The Bushes harbor dynastic ambitions, but the old patrician noblesse oblige has changed. “Somehow,” writes Palm Beach Post Tallahassee bureau chief and longtime John Ellis Bush watcher Dáte, “Prescott Bush’s duty to lead has, through a new combination of chromosomes, mutated into the right to rule.” By Dáte’s account, that conviction impelled George W., older and less gifted, to seek the White House. It may set Jeb Bush—unlike his brother, a reader, policy-minded leader and hard worker—on the same course, unless Dubya so tarnishes the name that no Bush is named dogcatcher, much less chief executive. The brothers do not always get along, especially on Election Day 2000, when it appeared that Jeb, governor of Florida, would not be able to deliver his state. Dáte suggests that a clear-cut Dubya victory might have been in the bag had not Jeb alienated some 300,000 black voters with an attack on affirmative action; but then, as he notes, Jeb, though not racist as such, has some difficulties with minorities, mostly the poor ones, who, in his worldview, bring poverty on themselves. In this, Dáte writes, Jeb is much like his brother. He shares other points on the résumé, having been allowed to use other people’s money—especially the taxpayers’ in the wake of the infamous S&L scandal—to make their fortunes. He is also like his brother in having come to office on a pleasing “compassionate conservatism” platform that instantly hardened into a rightist, “win-at-any-cost” antagonism, much beholden to fundamentalist Christians and the hardcore right. Jeb has also frittered away Floridians’ money by giving massive tax cuts to the rich—Dáte writes that his Democratic predecessors raised taxes and created more jobs than Bush has, disproving his fiscal arguments—and, though priding himself on being an “education governor” of the no-child-left-behind ilk, has much worsened Florida’s schools. There is scarcely a positive note in the book, save that Dáte finds Jeb personally likeable in some measure and notes that Jeb at least registered for the draft during the Vietnam era, even if, as Bush said, he “wanted to get married, work and have a family” and had “no compelling reason to go to Vietnam.”
After reading this, voters may find no compelling reason to support Jeb, either.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2007
ISBN: 1-58542-548-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: TarcherPerigee
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2006
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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