Not the first book to turn to when reading about Watergate but still a useful overview of long-ago events.
The veteran newscaster turns in a swift-flowing narrative of the decline and collapse of the Nixon administration.
“As we experience another chaotic time in the American presidency, it is worth remembering what we went through before.” So writes Brokaw (A Lucky Life Interrupted: A Memoir of Hope, 2015, etc.), recalling a time in which chaos reigned in the White House, where he served as NBC’s correspondent during Nixon’s final months in office. The facts of the matter are fairly well understood, thanks to books such as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s All the President’s Men and The Final Days, but Brokaw brings a more searching, controlling question to the enterprise: “Who was Richard Nixon?” That’s a question to which answers are both tentative and still forthcoming. The author’s narrative spans several years of Nixon’s life, taking in such critical moments as his appointment of Henry Kissinger as his secretary of state. Brokaw focuses closely on the last six weeks of his presidency, a period marked by a Supreme Court decision ruling that Nixon did not have the legal right to shield tape recordings from a Congress that was in full-tilt investigatory mode, a decision that would “amount to a political death sentence to a sitting president.” The author illuminates such turning points as Nixon’s explaining away the missing 18-odd minutes of tape that so excited Watergate investigators, concluding that he wished he hadn’t recorded in the first place, and the soon-to-follow declaration, infamous to this day, that “I’m not a crook.” The mood in the White House turned ever more erratic thereafter, with Nixon becoming oddly aggressive—understandably, because, as Brokaw observes, “the best defense for Nixon was always a strong offense.” The book is understated and even-tempered, without the fire of Woodward and Bernstein, Timothy Crouse, Hunter S. Thompson, and other chroniclers of the Nixon era; the calmness is welcome, though, for a narrative that seeks clarity in that time of torment.
Not the first book to turn to when reading about Watergate but still a useful overview of long-ago events.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6970-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
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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