A personal look at the Secretary’s diplomacy via a flexible, pragmatic approach rather than ideology.
An intimate, admiring look at the four-year global travails of the secretary of state from a member of her traveling press corps.
A Beirut-born BBC journalist assigned to the U.S. State Department in 2008, Ghattas has closely observed Clinton in her busy, high-profile position as secretary over the last four years. Here, she records her key role in the reshaping of American foreign policy. Ghattas’ work is invaluable in revealing the effort behind the headlines, from Clinton’s choice of Japan for her maiden voyage to sparring with the Israelis, Pakistanis and Chinese, plugging holes from WikiLeaks revelations and riding the eruptions of Arab uprisings. Yet here also is a rare glimpse of the woman behind the glamorous name and powerful credentials: Flanked by her devoted young assistants, Clinton often ventured to the back of the plane, sans makeup and wearing her glasses, to share a drink and chat off the record with the cadre of reporters who regularly traveled with her around the world. Unlike her buttoned-up predecessor, Condoleezza Rice, Clinton seemed to relax amid her staggering travels and meetings, usually running late (“on Hillary time”) but giving everyone her full attention, speaking to rapt audiences and letting the officers who held her agenda sweat it out. Wielding her “soft agenda” of women’s rights, moving to repair much of the damage imposed by the Bush administration, such as the invasion of Iraq, and appeasing foes who gloated on America’s “imperial overstretch,” Clinton was quietly but firmly reaffirming U.S. leadership. Along the way, Ghattas, as a Lebanese woman who keenly felt the American betrayal of her country during the long civil war of 1975 to 1990, comes to a sense of forgiveness and understanding of American might.
A personal look at the Secretary’s diplomacy via a flexible, pragmatic approach rather than ideology.Pub Date: March 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-0805095111
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2012
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
PERSPECTIVES
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