Noonan is quick to generalize, to soak sentences in nostalgia, and to ignore contradictory or uncomfortable evidence, but...
A former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan and weekly columnist for the Wall Street Journal assembles pieces from her long career as a conservative political voice.
Noonan (Patriotic Grace: What It Is and Why We Need It Now, 2008, etc.) never allows her political preferences to slip far beneath the flowing surface of her skillful prose. Although some of the pieces are from the early 1980s, most are fairly recent—or have some recent resonance. There will be some surprises for those who have not read her often. She loves The Sopranos, admires Jackie Kennedy and Tennessee Williams, praises President Barack Obama for a sensitive comment, and even zaps George W. Bush occasionally. She also chides the GOP for seeming to fall apart in the lead-up to the 2008 presidential election. But she continually celebrates an American past whose virtues she highlights while ignoring the social failures of segregation, the denial of equal rights for women, and the vile biases experienced by people who were not fortunate to live their lives in Ozzie and Harriet’s neighborhood. In one piece, Noonan discusses the GOP’s taking the South from Democrats without mentioning much about the civil rights issues that triggered that transformation. The author writes in praise of men like John Wayne (we need more men like him, in all walks of life), calls Reagan a great president (and slams Edmund Morris’ unconventional Reagan biography, Dutch, 1999), and blasts the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church for failures in the recent sex scandals. There are sharp words for Bill and Hillary Clinton and Obama, whose health care initiatives she calls a “blunder” and a “miscalculation.” Her eloquence soars in her pieces about 9/11, and she disdains frequent polling and bemoans the loss of privacy.
Noonan is quick to generalize, to soak sentences in nostalgia, and to ignore contradictory or uncomfortable evidence, but she does provide moments that pierce and sentences that linger.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4555-6311-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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