Those interested in the Bush part of the Bandar Bush story might want to have another look at Fahrenheit 9/11. Simpson’s...
A partial—in both senses—life of the Saudi diplomat and powerbroker dubbed “Bandar Bush.”
“If you knew what we were really doing for America,” Prince Bandar once proclaimed, “you wouldn’t just give us AWACS; you would give us nuclear weapons.” Among the things he’s done on our behalf: pushed for war with Saddam Hussein following the invasion of Kuwait; laundered money in Iran-Contra; engineered the ouster of several officials in the Reagan administration; brokered side deals with China that nearly plunged the Middle East into an apocalyptic war. All that, by fellow fighter-pilot trainee Simpson’s account, can be written off to Machiavellian vicissitudes; otherwise, Bandar is a good guy, the kind of guy Thatcher could do business with and inside whose soul Dubya could peer approvingly. An illegitimate scion of the royal family brought in from the cold, Bandar helped formulate the Saudi foreign policy that can be simplified thus: “The Communists are atheists; they don’t believe in religion and we are fighting them for religious reasons.” Thus the ethic of Osama bin Laden, another royal outsider, about whom there is not much newsworthy in these pages; indeed, the better and best part of Simpson’s narrative takes place 20 and more years ago. Simpson takes it as given that the U.S. government is controlled by the “Jewish-Israeli lobby,” determined to keep Saudi Arabia from taking its proper place in the world (by, one supposes, denying the regime nuclear weapons and long-range missiles). Just so, the neoconservatives in the second Bush administration are a “cabal” that “consistently thwarted efforts to achieve a just settlement to the Palestinian problem.” As such, be warned that this unofficial biography of an undoubtedly interesting fellow bears official stamps.
Those interested in the Bush part of the Bandar Bush story might want to have another look at Fahrenheit 9/11. Simpson’s revelations, however, have use for readers seeking a view of how Washington really works.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-089986-7
Page Count: 496
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
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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