In the end, a fine, readable and often disturbing look at power and its infinitely corruptible ways.
Two men strive to be somebody, and nearly take down a nation along the way.
Historian and biographer Dallek (Hail to the Chief, 1996, etc.) observes that neither Richard Nixon nor Henry Kissinger had much patience with psychoanalysis, but that does not deter him from engaging in a little psychobiography: Both Nixon and Kissinger, who were in essence co-presidents for the last months before Nixon resigned in 1974, were driven, needful men, able to apply themselves to the hardest work and quick to align themselves with those who could advance them. Kissinger, for instance, tried to insinuate himself in the Kennedy administration, but, rebuffed, was happy to find a place in Nixon’s. That place would become central, to mixed result. As Dallek shows, Nixon and Kissinger were odd partners, each despising and fearing the other; years into their partnership, when Kissinger was nearly the only Nixon administration figure to enjoy high standing in the court of public opinion, Nixon complained to aide H.R. Haldeman that Kissinger “is very popular, got good applause, including from our opponents, and a standing and prolonged ovation at the House, but he didn’t make our points.” Much as he may have wanted to, however, Nixon never fired Kissinger, who in turn helped engineer Nixonian triumphs such as the so-called opening of China and the American withdrawal from Vietnam, but who also authored the loss of Vietnam and, though he denied it, the coup in Chile. Working from a trove of recently declassified documents, Dallek capably relates Nixon and Kissinger’s strange relationship, which crumbled after Nixon left office. Along the way, he offers telling notes that a careful reader will link to current events, such as the congressional veto-busting that led to the War Powers Act and Nixon’s last-minute appeal, very late in the game, that America should become energy-independent.
In the end, a fine, readable and often disturbing look at power and its infinitely corruptible ways.Pub Date: May 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-06-072230-4
Page Count: 752
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2007
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
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
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