A knowledgeable survey for students and a glimpse into what the Islamist future might offer.
A solid overview of the Arab revolutions, country by country, from the first nationalist stirrings of the 1950s that put the dictators in place to the snowballing events in recent years.
Dawisha (Political Science/Miami Univ., Ohio; Iraq: A Political History) lends his insight into recent upheavals in the Arab world prompted by the staggering oppression of the many by the venal, rich few that has gone on for far too long. There is a satisfying sense of fatal payback in the Baghdad-born author’s narrative of the spreading “virus of liberation” catching on from Tunis to Cairo to Tripoli and beyond. The people of these oppressed lands demanded greater political rights from their leaders and were not going to back down in 2011, thanks to greater numbers, social media and the inability of police forces to keep news of insurrection from spreading. Flooding the streets with security police and offering the people a few cosmetic reforms worked in some hot spots, such as Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Morocco, but the same tactics quickly led to the toppling of dictators in Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen. In Libya and Syria, however, the leaders did not hesitate to use shocking force against the demonstrators. While Gadhafi died by the same sword, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad continues to butcher his own people with impunity, convinced perversely that they love him. Dawisha steps back to examine Nasser’s role as galvanizer of the first Arab Revolution, tapping into the humiliation Arabs felt at Western imperialism by the mid-1950s—followed by the “predatory authoritarianism” of the young, idealistic leaders who took the helms and were never really interested in “freedom.”
A knowledgeable survey for students and a glimpse into what the Islamist future might offer.Pub Date: April 8, 2013
ISBN: 978-0393240122
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2013
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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