Rich material in plain packaging.
The 60 Minutes warhorse, now 87, recounts his most memorable interviews.
Wallace again teams up with Gates, his collaborator on the 1984 memoir Close Encounters, for this look back at an impressive 60-year career in journalism. In chapters including “Presidents,” “Icons and Artists” and “First Couples,” interview excerpts are interspersed with commentary from Wallace. While the writing is straightforward as it can be, the man has met enough notable people to make the book fascinating. Wallace applies a light touch when discussing chief executives, trying to find the good in irascible characters like Nixon and LBJ (Wallace recalls that LBJ once forced 60 Minutes producer Don Hewitt, his passenger, out of a car on his Texas ranch to pick up a candy wrapper and then drove off). He also gingerly handles icons like Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. But in two standout chapters, “The Middle East” and “Con Men and Other Crooks,” Wallace’s needling style is on full display. The title, in fact, comes from the conspiratorial phrase he uttered to elicit a startling on-camera confession from Chicago crook Phil Barasch. Among the more amusing exchanges here is that between Wallace and Salvador Dalí. When Wallace asked him why he adores old age, the painter responded, “Because the little young peoples completely stupid, you know.” Wallace admits that it was years before he realized “how profoundly wise” Dalí was on the subject of age.
Rich material in plain packaging.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-4013-0029-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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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