A vividly rendered account of life in office, with plenty of beneficial pointers to aspiring politicos on either side of the...
Long-awaited, uncommonly candid memoir by the former British prime minister.
Politics isn’t needed to liberate people, Blair writes; it’s the other way around. “An odd thing for a politician to say,” he admits, “but then…it has never been entirely clear whether the journey I have taken is one of the triumph of the person over the politics, or of the politics over the person.” Regardless, Blair is a political animal to the core. There are few personal details here, in the manner of Bill Clinton’s My Life (2004), Clinton being one of Blair’s heroes. There are, however, plenty of personal opinions about the people with whom he has served, from his successor Gordon Brown (who might still have his job “had he pursued New Labour policy”) to George W. Bush, who, the author insists, is anything but stupid—though his political intuition “wasn’t expressed analytically or intellectually.” Blair is famously both analytical and intellectual, and he provides a careful rationale for having bought the weapons of mass destruction canard and committed British troops to Iraq—it boils down mostly to the argument that Saddam was a bad guy and needed to go, or “the region needed a fundamental reordering.” The region got that reordering, of course, which was one of the causes of Blair’s being invited to leave office by the ungrateful electorate of Britain, for which the author seems to have a touch of impatience, if not thinly veiled contempt: “We were like two people standing either side of a thick pane of glass trying to have a conversation.” Blair concludes with an argument for further reordering, including the West becoming closer to China and the European Union’s “adopting a common energy policy,” among other things.
A vividly rendered account of life in office, with plenty of beneficial pointers to aspiring politicos on either side of the Atlantic.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-26983-6
Page Count: 800
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2010
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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