More than 35 years after leaving office, Brownell recalls serving as campaign adviser and attorney general for the man ``head and shoulders above all the other political figures I have ever encountered'': Dwight D. Eisenhower. In many ways, Brownell's autobiography—with an assist from Burke (Political Science/University of Vermont)—could serve as the credo of the ``Wall Street wing'' of socially moderate, internationalist Republicans once epitomized by Thomas Dewey (whose two runs for the presidency Brownell guided as campaign manager) and Nelson Rockefeller. In several years as a New York State assemblyman in the 1930's, the reforming young lawyer and Nebraska native learned not to ``denounce one's opponents too strongly or two personally''; indeed, his only real pique here is vented at fiercely partisan Democrats Harry Truman and FDR, including the dark hint that the latter might have lost the 1944 election but for coverups of his health and of alleged negligence at Pearl Harbor. Although these memoirs also cover the Dewey campaigns and Brownell's 62 years of private law practice, the most compelling sections deal with the Eisenhower years. Brownell is most revealing about the hush-hush communications and climactic secret meeting that led the general to seek the 1952 GOP nomination; how Ike came to appoint Earl Warren to the Supreme Court; and the author's own key support for the awakening civil-rights movement. Throughout, Brownell displays intelligence, respect for public service, and shrewdness in assessing how his nonpolitician boss built a cohesive team and retained the affection of the American people. But his narrative is inhibited by a lawyerly reluctance to reveal anything too damaging to his ``client'' (for example, Brownell's contention that Ike was not trying to dump Nixon by offering him a Cabinet post is pure spin-control). Despite the reticence: an important memoir likely to bolster Eisenhower's evolving reputation for above-the-fray, ``hidden- hand'' leadership. (Twenty-six b&w photos—not seen)
Pub Date: May 3, 1993
ISBN: 0-7006-0590-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Univ. Press of Kansas
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1993
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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