Foreign policy master, political brawler, family man, loner, tragic hero, criminal, elder statesman, eternal conniver—Richard Nixon plays all of these roles in the final installment of Ambrose's fascinating three-volume biography (1987, 1989) of the ex-President. Ambrose (History/Univ. of New Orleans) meticulously traces how Nixon—flush with triumph from his landslide reelection victory over George McGovern—spoiled, through his mishandling of Watergate, his best-laid plans for reorganizing the executive branch of the government and for achieving a durable peace in Vietnam and with the Soviet Union. There aren't many surprises here about this extensively documented portion of Nixon's life, but Ambrose compensates with an excellent assessment of his subject's character and record. The author underscores what America lost, as a result of Nixon's Icarus-like fall, in such areas as arms control, energy policy, the Mideast, and national health insurance (though, dubiously, he bemoans the Reagan Revolution without acknowledging how much it owed to Nixon's polarizing campaigns). Admiring Nixon's perseverance, Ambrose draws a sympathetic portrait of the beleaguered politician's attempts to handle a vain Henry Kissinger, military top brass contemptuous of dÉtente, even politicians and lawyers unnerved by Nixon's blatant disregard for the Constitution. In the end, despite appreciating Nixon's intelligence and ability, Ambrose scores the President for a lack of domestic achievements and an even more demonstrable lack of virtue. An adroit retelling of how Nixon plunged into his political black hole—and why, like Lady Macbeth's "damned spot," and despite his carefully orchestrated comeback, his role in the Watergate cover-up can never be obliterated.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-671-69188-0
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1991
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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