A modest and insightful addition to a growing shelf of books by insiders from the Obama administration.
Jarrett's brisk, even-tempered memoir follows the former senior adviser to President Barack Obama from a childhood spent first in Iran and then in Chicago through her experiences during Obama's two terms in office.
The author’s parents moved to Iran in 1955 because her father knew that as a black physician, he would have better opportunities there than in the United States. She was born there the next year, and five years later, the family returned to Chicago, where her mother's large extended family lived. After law school and a stint in corporate law, she began working in Chicago city government. In 1991, while she was working as Mayor Richard Daley's deputy chief of staff, she hired a young Michelle Robinson, then Barack Obama's fiancee. She went on to become friends with Robinson and Obama and worked on Obama's campaign before serving in the White House. Jarrett also shares her personal struggles: escaping a difficult marriage, raising a daughter on her own, overcoming a fear of public speaking, enduring menopause, and experiencing the pressure “to work twice as hard and be twice as good as white people.” Her close relationship with the Obamas allows for an intimate view of events on the campaign trail and life in the White House. Her account of her years in the administration shifts smoothly between her own work life, including the mentoring of young female staff members, and a broader consideration of the administration's goals. She gives special consideration to the challenges of passing the Affordable Care Act, and while she clearly chooses her words carefully, her frustration with what she sees as the recalcitrant Republicans in Congress sometimes breaks through. Throughout, she emphasizes the importance of communication among people of differing political views and the necessity of change based in local communities rather than imposed on a national level.
A modest and insightful addition to a growing shelf of books by insiders from the Obama administration.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-55813-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
PROFILES
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
PERSPECTIVES
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