Against these highlights, some of Kelly’s curmudgeonly, conservative cultural pieces pale. But the highlights are brilliant...
A splendid collection of newspaper and magazine pieces by the late Kelly (Martyr’s Day, 1993), the first “embedded journalist” to die in the latest Iraq war.
Kelly, 46 at the time of his death in April 2003, was no stranger to action; famously, he scampered off to Iraq as a freelance writer in the first Gulf War after a New Republic editor issued a challenge, “We’ll use your stuff if you can be in Baghdad when the bombs drop.” His reports from the Desert Storm front are jarring and unglamorous: in one of them, he remarks, “The days of delusion are dead in Baghdad. The city has fatally discovered the obvious: a contest between a third world semipower fighting World War II and a first world superpower fighting World War III is no contest at all.” Everyone in the city knew this, it appears, but Saddam Hussein and his closest aides, who, Kelly adds, went on speechifying about how the Allies’ “defeat will be certain” until the bitter end. And that end was bitter indeed; one of Kelly’s reports describes a Kuwaiti man moving carefully from body to body in a field full of dead Iraqis, spitting in the face of each, then “heading up the road to spit on the next of the waiting dead.” Kelly’s reports on the walking wounded and the strangely undead are just as good, such as his celebrated (and in some circles infamous) portrait of Sen. Edward Kennedy (“The skin has gone from red roses to gin blossoms. . . . The Chiclet teeth are the color of old piano keys”), his profile of political fixer David Gergen, and his wonderful account of Bob Dole’s last stand, when, battling Bill Clinton for the presidency in 1996, he “waged what one senior campaign official called ‘a renegade campaign,’ running as much against his own operation as against Clinton.”
Against these highlights, some of Kelly’s curmudgeonly, conservative cultural pieces pale. But the highlights are brilliant indeed, showing that American journalism lost much with Kelly’s passing.Pub Date: April 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-59420-012-2
Page Count: 436
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
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
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