A lively and perceptive look at life in parts of the world few Westerners will ever experience firsthand.
A sharp-eyed, intrepid journalist’s account of her recent experiences living, teaching, and traveling in Muslim Central Asia and the Near East.
Burkett (Another Planet, 2001, etc.) begins with her August 2001 arrival in Kyrgyzistan, where she will spend a year as a Fulbright professor at the Kyrgyz-Russo-Slavic University in Bishkek, the country’s capital. It’s the ugliest, shabbiest city she or her husband has ever seen, and their immediate adventures with housing and food are the stuff of comedy. The tone turns darker when detailing Burkett’s classroom struggles with her repressed, ill-informed Muslim journalism students. Bewildered by concepts of freedom of the press, competition, and investigative journalism, they mouth what they’ve long been taught about the US, capitalism, and democracy as Burkett doggedly needles them into the beginnings of critical thinking. In November she makes a harrowing journey into and out of Kabul to report on the situation of women in Afghanistan for Elle magazine. Shortly thereafter she visits Iran, where she finds Stone Age fundamentalism thriving alongside modern technology—or as she puts it, polygamy side by side with Gucci shoes. Teaching assignments take her briefly to Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan; Burkett’s portraits of life there are revealing and vivid, as are her insightful descriptions of her travels in Iraq the year before the US invasion and of her homeward-bound journey through Mongolia, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Myanmar. The author seems to relish meeting people and picking their brains. Her views are fresh and often funny, her courage astonishing, and her endurance remarkable. Expecting to find hatred, she encounters surprising hospitality, much curiosity and contradictory beliefs about Americans, anguish at being caught between modernity and old-world traditions, and great unease about the future.
A lively and perceptive look at life in parts of the world few Westerners will ever experience firsthand.Pub Date: April 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-052442-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2004
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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