An absorbing insider’s view of more than 50 years of U.S. history.
Former Vice President Mondale calls upon his five decades of experience in public office to address today’s dangerously polarized political process.
In 1964, when the author came to Washington to fill Hubert Humphrey’s vacated Senate seat, “[a]cross the South, African-Americans couldn’t eat at a lunch counter, couldn’t drink from a public drinking fountain, often couldn’t register to vote.” The Cold War was also a frightening reality, and “nearly 20 percent of Americans lived in poverty.” Liberals in both parties fought together against Southern Democrats and Goldwater Republicans to pass civil-rights legislation. Mondale attributes ending the war in Vietnam to intervention by Senate liberals, which finally forced Lyndon Johnson and, later, Richard Nixon to address the increasing debacles on the ground. The author also examines the significant role of the bipartisan Senate commission—on which he served—in bringing Nixon to account on Watergate and its attendant criminal activities. The author deplores the failure of the Senate to conduct a similar investigation of the actions of the Bush/Cheney administration for what he believes to have been constitutional violations—attempting to use the president’s role as commander-in-chief to “set policy without answering to anyone but themselves,” and employing torture in defiance of the Geneva Accords. Though Mondale argued against many of President Carter’s decisions, he believes that history has yet to give Carter his due. It was Carter, he notes, not Reagan, who first cut back on government programs and “deregulated the airline industry, the trucking industry, and the prices of oil and gas.”
An absorbing insider’s view of more than 50 years of U.S. history.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4391-5866-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 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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