Unenlightening and unpersuasive.
A former UN official’s defensive memoir of serving as the international community’s first responder to civil wars and natural disasters.
It’s hard not to like someone who braved danger in Iraq, Colombia, Darfur, Lebanon, Palestine, the Ivory Coast, Zimbabwe and Uganda as UN undersecretary-general and emergency-relief coordinator from 2003 to 2006. Now director of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs and UN Special Envoy for Conflict Resolution, Egeland can at last comment freely, he observes. It’s true that the author doesn’t exactly blow kisses to George W. Bush, to John Bolton, the president’s outspoken former ambassador to the UN, or to conservative pundits and bloggers who lambasted his undiplomatic comment at the onset of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami crisis that major Western powers had been “stingy” with development aid. Yet Egeland squanders readers’ sympathy with a largely unreflective, platitudinous narrative. He’s content to simply assert that UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan is “principled,” Deputy Secretary-General Louise Fréchette “impressive” and chief arms inspector Hans Blix “able” without ever showing actions that demonstrate these qualities. Other times, he descends to posturing. “Our only option is to speak the truth, always,” he notes, though if he had criticized tyrants and warlords all the time, they would never have agreed to negotiate with him. In claiming that multilateralism works, Egeland begs the question of why so many nations—not just the United States, but even, he admits, Asian and African countries—forego coalitions. He reproves both sides in the Arab-Israeli conflict, but comes down more heavily on Israel’s policies in Gaza and the West Bank for derailing the Oslo peace process (in which he participated) than on the PLO’s Second Intifada in 2000. Likewise, while claiming that the Oil-for-Food program prevented an Iraqi humanitarian catastrophe, he refuses to acknowledge that some officials, including the former UN head of the program, stole significant amounts of the aid meant for Saddam Hussein’s impoverished subjects.
Unenlightening and unpersuasive.Pub Date: March 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4165-6096-8
Page Count: 364
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2008
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
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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