Full of fresh, endlessly revealing insights into Nixon’s political career, less on the matter of his character,...
A sturdy study of the man ranked at the bottom of many historians’ lists of presidents.
Richard Nixon (1913-1994) was nothing if not complicated. As journalist and biographer Farrell (Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned, 2011, etc.) observes, he defied all expectations by ordering the foundation of the Environmental Protection Agency and promulgating numerous pieces of related legislation that today have earned him second place only to Theodore Roosevelt on the environmentalists’ thumbs-up roster of Republican presidents. Yet he also “vetoed the Clean Water Act, which he claimed was too costly.” Congress overrode him, yet even today Nixon is given credit for that law. He has been so well-studied that Farrell cannot help but cover familiar ground, and so he does: for instance, the ugly conduct of the red-baiting campaign against Helen Gahagan Douglas, of course, and the spectacularly fraught 1960 presidential race against John F. Kennedy. Yet there and elsewhere, Farrell teases lesser-known matters into view. Nixon blamed the Republican establishment for his loss in the latter race, for instance, but insightfully so, saying that the party had failed to gain the high ground in matters of civil rights. “I could have become president,” he said. “I needed only 5 percent more votes in the Negro areas.” That they failed to deliver was but one more betrayal, and though the author doesn’t go deep into psychobiography, he cannot help but note that Nixon was a sensitive man with a long memory for slights, as when Dwight Eisenhower suggested that he be not vice president but a Cabinet member in his second term. That is one of many news items that Farrell offers, from a fascinating aside on how it was Gerald Ford who replaced Spiro Agnew to how the taping system that brought Nixon down came to be discovered in the first place.
Full of fresh, endlessly revealing insights into Nixon’s political career, less on the matter of his character, refreshingly, than on the events that accompanied and resulted from it.Pub Date: March 28, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53735-3
Page Count: 752
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 25, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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