Part two of the Kissinger memoirs begins with his appointment as Secretary of State, in September 1973, and ends with Nixon's resignation, in August 1974. (A third volume, covering the Ford years, can thus be expected.) Kissinger professes to have been surprised by the appointment, reasoning that Nixon would not want a powerful Secretary of State. His clout as National Security Adviser he attributes practically to chance. Nixon, he thinks, saw him prospectively as an innocuous ploy, meant to undercut State; but his key role in dramatic events—the secret Vietnam negotiations, setting up Nixon's historic trip to China—turned him into a celebrity. The travails of Watergate then compelled Nixon to cede power to a forceful Kissinger in order to safeguard the foreign policy successes he so cherished for his reputation. Indeed, the weakening of the president by Watergate—and the ensuing "Kafkaesque," "surrealistic" atmosphere—is one of the volume's leitmotifs. Kissinger resumes battle, though, over conflicts in the first volume. He is preoccupied with blaming Cambodia's ghastly fate on the North Vietnamese and the US Congress. The Lon Nol regime, he claims, consisted of the same personnel as Sihanouk's; and he compares Lon Nol's fall with that of Diem. Nonetheless he was negotiating with the Chinese to return Sihanouk to power when Congress undercut him by banning the further bombing of Cambodia—the only tool left him since Congress had also ruled out US military aid to the Cambodian government. The negotiations collapsed, and the fate of Cambodia was sealed. Against critics like William Shawcross, he presents a document supposedly setting out the truth of the bombing campaign to refute charges that its savagery led directly to Khmer Rouge savagery; this, however, is merely a self-defense by the then-US ambassador, and his Deputy Chief of Mission. On Chile, Kissinger still maintains that the US had no hand in overthrowing Allende, "an avowed enemy of democracy as we know it"; but since Allende was a man of principle, it would also be an insult not to assume that he intended to make good on his radical proposals. The details of Kissinger's Middle East shuttle diplomacy are here—as well as of the ill-fated Salt II negotiations: a victim of Watergate, in Kissinger's view, since only a weak president would have countenanced the wrecking tactics of Secretary of Defense Schlesinger. Watergate takes its final toll as Kissinger prays with Nixon on the last night—pondering the "biblical proportions" of his fate. Myth-making and self-justifying on a grand scale—but with fewer momentous happenings than in volume one.
Pub Date: March 25, 1982
ISBN: 1451636458
Page Count: 1362
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1982
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
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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