Despite the author's obvious bias, the Heritage Foundation is undeniably influential, and political operatives of any stripe...
Bird’s-eye view of the right-wing powerhouse that brought us Reaganomics, the Contract with America and the tea party.
Heritage Foundation fellow Edwards is given to both statistics and theory. Nominally a study of now-retired founder Ed Feulner, his book exemplifies several truths of politics, one of which, as California Democratic politician Jesse Unruh once remarked, is that “money is the mother’s milk of politics.” So it is, and the Heritage Foundation receives gifts from corporations and individuals alike that add up to an $80 million per year operating budget, larger than any other think tank of right or left. Feulner’s life is illuminating in this tale of money and power. He began his career as a pro–Vietnam War activist from Chicago who helped win a congressional seat for a hard-right candidate once Don Rumsfeld—yes, that Don Rumsfeld—vacated it and who later served up much of the Reagan administration’s policies on matters fiscal, domestic, military and diplomatic. Edwards is, of course, biased in his hagiographical approach both to Feulner and to other heroes of the rightist cause, whereas his favorite epithet for anyone to the left is “radical.” In the case of Barack Obama, it’s “radical” but also the rather more elaborate “a resourceful Machiavellian" who's "formula was "money + organization + ideology + media + political success."
Despite the author's obvious bias, the Heritage Foundation is undeniably influential, and political operatives of any stripe will gain insight into how the place works courtesy of these pages.Pub Date: March 26, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-7704-3578-3
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Crown Forum
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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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