A little late in the coming, since we’ll soon be arguing about a new president. Still, a useful look back over eight years...
Barack Obama: dictator; secret Muslim; al-Qaida operative. If you’ve heard this sort of thing and want to argue against it, political consultant Hannah offers a useful primer.
It’s a useful thing indeed to have a compendium of opposition charges about, say, Obamacare being “an unmitigated disaster” or Benghazi being the modern Watergate and responses to them, especially since the Obama administration has seemed so uninterested in advancing those responses on its own hook. Hannah, a specialist in message-crafting, looks in turn at the usual conservative charges, beginning with the overarching first premise: namely, that Obama is a dictator, inclined to go it alone without the advice and consent of Congress and independent of reference to the Constitution. Nonsense, Hannah writes, even though “this line of argument actually [has begun] to resonate with the American people,” having been repeated ad infinitum on Fox News. The reality, writes the author, is that given an intransigently obstructionist Congress, Obama “has not been bashful about his use of executive orders”—even though Obama has used the executive order less than any other president since Grover Cleveland, who left office in 1897. But why did Obama pursue the much-hated bailout of Wall Street? Because Congress authorized him to do so, if perhaps not down to the last dime. But it didn’t work, did it? It did, and instead of making Wall Street into a socialist extension of the Federal Reserve, “the president invested in a market-driven…solution.” Seated next to a Bill O’Reilly–spouting uncle, readers of this completely reasonable book might sound like the voice of reason, but that begs the question: is there room in the current din for anything that’s not a shout, and is anyone going to listen anyway? Veteran illustrator Staake provides the visual accompaniments.
A little late in the coming, since we’ll soon be arguing about a new president. Still, a useful look back over eight years that, depending on your point of view, were the best of times or the worst of times.Pub Date: June 28, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-244305-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
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
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
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