Predictable passages aside, Panetta offers a valuable portrait of how things get done in Washington—cautiously, like this...
Former Secretary of Defense and CIA Director Panetta tells all—well, some—about his life in politics.
“I have talked at length in these pages about wars,” writes the author toward the end. Indeed he has: His time in politics has run from Saigon to Syria, while his recent responsibilities have embraced such diverse matters as helping handle the return of American POW Bowe Bergdahl—a deal, Panetta writes, that he disapproved of—and weathering the David Petraeus affair. The memoir begins along familiar, formulaic lines: son of hardworking immigrants, drawn to office by a sense of “duty to country and a conviction that government could play a constructive role in the life of its citizens,” paying dues under the tough tutelage of Tip O’Neill and Jim Wright, and so on. Panetta is gentle on most of the politicians who have crossed his path, though it’s clear he reserves considerable disdain for former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and his “divisive tactics.” It is also clear that the author was at odds with President Barack Obama at many points. Though mildly framed (“achievements cannot allow leaders to become complacent”), his criticism has a bite. Many of the sharpest divergences turn on the question of leaving Iraq: “It was no secret that I had fought to keep it from ending this way,” he writes, and he pursued doing so “with reservations.” Still, Panetta’s criticisms are mild in the context of his overall defense of his former boss: As he writes, he finds it “amusing” that Obama is seen as an ideologue instead of as a “realist and pragmatist” who has overcome unnecessarily staunch opposition to “make important progress in many areas, from fighting terrorism to righting the economy.”
Predictable passages aside, Panetta offers a valuable portrait of how things get done in Washington—cautiously, like this memoir, and with exquisite calculation.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-59420-596-5
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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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