by Jim Krane ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 15, 2009
A fact-crammed report on a culture of excess.
The history of the Persian Gulf’s most prosperous city.
With its extraordinary wealth, towering skyscrapers and hedonistic ways, Dubai has emerged as a major financial center and the world’s most cosmopolitan and tolerant city, writes Krane, a Dubai-based AP correspondent. In workmanlike prose, he details the city’s past as an insular village in a distant corner of Arabia, its early relations with Western traders and its transformation as part of the United Arab Emirates into an international tourist destination. The 175 years of stable rule by the Maktoum dynasty has been fundamental to the city’s commercial success, says the author. Now guided by the wealthy 60-year-old monarch and strategic planner Sheikh Mohammed, Dubai has leveraged its strengths—a small native population, proximity to oil and an enlightened ruling class—to become “the Middle East’s capital of commerce.” It boasts 350 luxury hotels (cheapest room at the iconic Burj Al Arab: $2,000), tax-free business zones (Internet City, Media City, etc.) and man-made islands like Palm Jumeirah, which houses an office tower twice as tall as the Empire State Building and the 1,200-shop Dubai Mall. In its relentless quest for modernity—electricity became widely available, and slavery was banned, in the 1960s—the city has attracted an unusually mixed population of two million (95 percent foreigners, from 200 countries). Indians bring much of the brainpower while construction workers from many nations provide brawn and live ascetic lives in desert labor camps. Krane portrays a boomtown of contrasts, where older residents who sign documents with a thumbprint have children with doctorates; and where average male citizens, who receive $55,000-per-year subsidies and $19,000 toward wedding costs, have a 20 percent unemployment rate. The epilogue explains how the global recession has sharply curtailed—at least for now—the frenetic growth of this key U.S. ally and spy center. Building roads and skyscrapers was the easy part, writes Krane. “Incubating an enlightened society will be harder.”
A fact-crammed report on a culture of excess.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-312-53574-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2009
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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
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by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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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