A critical but resolutely objective and utterly fascinating biography of the guileful, egocentric geopolitical scientist who became America's most celebrated secretary of state. Drawing on access to his subject's private papers, family members, friends, and foes, as well as on archival sources, Isaacson (an assistant managing editor at Time; coauthor, The Wise Men, 1986) offers an authoritative and comprehensive account. Tracking Kissinger from his boyhood as a persecuted Jew in Nazi Germany through his current estate as a globe-trotting business consultant who turns 70 next May, the author notes that Kissinger has displayed a knack for attracting influential patrons throughout his career. This talent served Kissinger well as an Army intelligence operative during WW II, at Harvard (where he earned a Ph.D. and professorship), and as a cold-war strategist who made a name for himself advising think tanks and government agencies. Latching on to an ultimate sponsor, he joined the Nixon Administration in 1969; survived Watergate largely unscathed; gained worldwide fame (plus a Nobel Peace Prize) for negotiating an end to the Vietnam War; and won even greater renown for feats of shuttle diplomacy in Africa, the Mideast, and elsewhere. While Isaacson gives Kissinger full marks for his many accomplishments in foreign policy, he minces few words in recounting the secretiveness, devotion to Realpolitik, and personal insecurities that gained Kissinger a reputation for Dr. Strangelove-like duplicity. Although Kissinger consistently had the courage of his conviction—that those engaged in statecraft must deal with ambiguities and accommodations—Isaacson concludes that a general perception of Kissinger's ruthlessness frequently cost him dearly owing to Americans' allegiance to human rights, democratic principles, the rule of international law, and other idealistic values. An evenhanded, warts-and-all portrait of a larger-than-life individual who has left his mark behind.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 0-671-66323-2
Page Count: 960
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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