Link’s scholarly and unsparing biography of Helms is recommended reading for anyone who wonders how the nation ever became...
Wide-ranging biography of the unrepentant racist and Cold Warrior par excellence.
If Ronald Reagan was the smiling, avuncular face of conservatism, Jesse Helms was its snarling pit bull—though, as Link (History/Univ. of Florida) notes, he rejected the “imperiousness of some of his colleagues” and was even “rated among the nicest senators” in a magazine survey of some 1,200 Capitol Hill employees. He may have been courtly and well-spoken, but Helms also carved a political niche in the civil-rights era as an opponent of desegregation and federal intervention in the South’s delicate little problem. “His insistence on white ‘rights’ as a sort of natural right would become a consistent theme in his rhetoric about race,” writes Link, one that scarcely matured as he ascended the political ranks. Fulminating against race-mixing, he also darkly warned in 1970 that the “longhairs” in the streets might just get a revolution after all, “but not the kind they expect.” Helms was right, of course, and he gloried in the reactionary ’70s and ’80s, serving as a vigorous ally of and spokesman for just about any South-American dictator who came along, “reporting to his constituents favorably about their authoritarian regimes” while railing against Jimmy Carter’s plan to return the Panama Canal to Panama. In his later terms, he groomed the likes of Trent Lott, allied himself with fundamentalists and anti–gay rights activists and vigorously opposed a holiday for Martin Luther King. His last days in the Senate were spent battling the appointments of African-Americans to various posts, even though he seems to have melted, at the end, when rock star Bono came calling with his program of debt relief for Africa.
Link’s scholarly and unsparing biography of Helms is recommended reading for anyone who wonders how the nation ever became what it is.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-35600-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2007
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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