Heavy on affirmative experiences; light on political insight.
Side-by-side diaries from the first Jewish candidate for vice-president and his wife chronicle some laughs and some letdowns, but no regrets.
The Liebermans take refuge at every opportunity in platitudes about faith, freedom, diversity, and other perceived “only in America” attributes, but no one can say they don’t come from the heart. The couple’s account of the harrowing emotional roller coaster that the Democratic national campaign was for them also displays a regrettable tendency to inject well-worn Seinfeldian humor whenever there’s a lull in the action. There are, however, some genuinely funny moments. Witness the Lieberman tribe walking its dutiful mile and a half to Sabbath services in Connecticut interspersed with a Secret Service platoon whose members try to blend in by wearing those white silk skullcaps usually reserved for gentile guests at weddings and bar mitzvahs—until somebody points out that they stand out like a bunch of, well, Secret Service guys. There are few political surprises in Joe’s recounting: Bush surprised Gore in the TV debates, he feels; gun-owning Democrats were a big vulnerability; and he still believes his ticket would have taken Florida and thus the presidency had all the votes cast been counted. The only time the senator shows any real rancor, however, is in condemning Ralph Nader (“once my hero”) for falsely lumping mainstream Democrats with Republicans as running roughshod over the environment on behalf of big corporations. Hadassah’s narratives seem fresher than her husband’s, and quite revealing about the energy-sapping triviality of the spousal role in a national campaign. She loves her Joey and truly respects Al Gore as presidential material, but couldn’t she please, after all, have her own airplane, even if it’s just a little one?
Heavy on affirmative experiences; light on political insight.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-2938-X
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2002
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
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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