An excellent chronicle of JFK’s innovations, his true personality, and how close he came to losing.
Accepting the challenge that Theodore White laid out in The Making of the President 1960: to “tell the story of the quest for power in 1960 in more precise terms with a greater wealth of established fact.”
In this successful acceptance of White’s challenge, Pulitzer Prize–winning Boston Globe journalist Oliphant (Utter Incompetents: Ego and Ideology in the Age of Bush, 2007, etc.) and former Globe foreign correspondent Wilkie (Journalism/Univ. of Mississippi; The Fall of the House of Zeus: The Rise and Ruin of America's Most Powerful Trial Lawyer, 2010) begin before John F. Kennedy’s run to be Adlai Stevenson’s running mate in 1956. Although popular opinion claims that JFK’s father directed his decisions and campaigns, JFK was always in charge and not afraid to oppose or ignore his father. He surrounded himself with shrewd advisers whose philosophy was brash and very successful. Most importantly to his later success, JFK started early. Then he bypassed the party bosses and labor unions and set up representatives in small towns to build support and lists of contacts. He and his team knew how to work the grass-roots strategy, giving tea parties for women, circulating petitions, and, most importantly, using TV ads. One of the first to closely monitor public opinion, JFK was handsome and popular, and the press loved his quotable accessibility. However, he was no shoo-in. His record in the Senate was weak, and his meek responses to Joe McCarthy worked against him. Race and religion were major undercurrents throughout the race, and the lead flipped back and forth multiple times. White was spot-on in his prediction of the availability of new information. Oliphant and Wilkie mined a wealth of fresh material to show how Kennedy approached his campaign in innovative ways. The authors impressively navigate all the new information to present a compelling story, easily shifting geographically and supplying background vital to understanding the whole picture.
An excellent chronicle of JFK’s innovations, his true personality, and how close he came to losing.Pub Date: May 9, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-0556-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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