Fascinating to dip into casually and essential to students of the Kennedy administration, the Cold War, and...
Three months, 1,700 pages. But what months they were: a season in the midterm administration of John F. Kennedy marked by faltering polls, the aftermath of near nuclear war, and one crisis after another.
Yes, JFK secretly taped conversations in the White House, just like Nixon—and Johnson, Eisenhower, Truman, and Roosevelt. Nixon’s problem was refusing to acknowledge that his tapes existed. Kennedy, write the editors of this exhaustive set of transcripts, most probably taped in order to preserve moments for his post–White House memoir, and they “find no evidence that he taped only self-flattering moments.” Indeed, the tapes find the president wondering whether he’d been responsible for the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, the immediate results of which occupy him and his advisers in the first 1,000 pages of this collection, housed at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. The present set of volumes opens the day after the crisis, “the world’s closest brush with global thermonuclear war,” ended; it closes with Kennedy still preoccupied with the cat and mouse of dealing with Fidel Castro and Nikita Khrushchev even as other leaders—from France’s Charles de Gaulle to emboldened Congressional Republicans at home—jockeyed to take advantage of changes in global realpolitik. One of those changes was a perceptible rise in American military readiness: as the editors note, on Nov. 4, the Strategic Air Command reached the peak of its force, such that “if the President ordered retaliatory strikes against the Soviet Union on this day, 1,749 nuclear bombers and 182 ballistic nuclear missiles were ready.” Even so, the collection sees Kennedy and aides such as Dean Rusk and Robert McNamara resisting the military’s demands for more funding and new weapons. For instance, said Kennedy to his chief military adviser of a submarine-mounted missile, “I don’t see quite why we’re building as many as we’re building.”
Fascinating to dip into casually and essential to students of the Kennedy administration, the Cold War, and late-20th-century world history.Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-393-08124-4
Page Count: 1728
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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