Naftali (Blind Spot: The Secret History of American Counterterrorism, 2005, etc.) offers a soft-pedaling, well-paced glimpse...
Latest title in the American Presidents Series spotlights the elder Bush’s uneven one-term presidency, riding Reagan’s coattails and navigating the “new world order.”
Son of a Republican senator from Connecticut, educated at Phillips Academy and Yale, a naval aviator during World War II, George Herbert Walker Bush forged a path unique from his father’s by moving to West Texas with wife Barbara to grow rich as an oil man. He lost Senate runs in 1964 and 1970, his mixture of social liberalism and economic conservatism doomed by compromises on key issues. Expedient and tactical, pragmatic and emotional, Bush won a congressional election in 1966 thanks to his friend James A. Baker III. Briefly considered as Nixon’s running mate, he was instead offered a job as United Nations representative, then chairman of the Republican National Committee. After a stint as UN representative to China and head of the CIA under Gerald Ford, Bush ran for president against Ronald Reagan and was again sidelined as an understudy. Vice President Bush was Reagan’s loyal soldier and crisis manager, a key participant in the controversial Iran-Contra scandal and coverup. His political adaptability was often taken as a sign of weakness. “Fighting the Wimp Factor” became his presidential campaign’s rallying cry against Bob Dole and Michael Dukakis. Cleaning up Reagan’s mess marked the beginning of his presidency, which was plagued by the budget deficit, the savings-and-loan debacle, the intransigence of Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega and Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. However, the unraveling of the Soviet bloc allowed Bush moments of greatness. These did not protect him from becoming an object of public scorn and being roundly defeated in 1992 by Democrat Bill Clinton.
Naftali (Blind Spot: The Secret History of American Counterterrorism, 2005, etc.) offers a soft-pedaling, well-paced glimpse at the career highlights of a man whose presidency still remains murky and out-of-focus.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-8050-6966-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2007
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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