A cautionary volume that stresses the need to educate, treat and create jobs.
Grim text and photographs depict an India very different from the booming economic superpower-in-training of contemporary myth.
Instead, this collection of 16 narratives focuses on the nation’s many pockets of desperate poverty and joblessness where families reap a few rupees from selling their daughters while police and petty bureaucrats take a cut (and free sex) from sex workers on their beat. The concentration of HIV in particular risk groups rather than across the population as a whole echoes Elizabeth Pisani’s findings from her work in Southeast Asia (The Wisdom of Whores, 2008). Various writers of Indian ethnicity, birth or residency—including Salmon Rushdie, Kiran Desai and Vikram Seth—depict the daily grind of sex workers, drug addicts and long-distance truck drivers, each providing a take-home message. Even in the occasional tales featuring such atypical AIDS sufferers as a servant, a physician or a noted filmmaker, the same issues persist: difficulties in implementing condom or clean needle use; overwhelming ignorance about the disease’s cause and transmission. Stigma leads to secrecy, shame and avoidance of treatment, which in India is largely free. A family pleased to live off the earnings of their daughter when she was healthy dumped her in a corner of their house and let her starve to death after she developed AIDS. William Dalrymple poignantly portrays a lovely young devadasi sold by her parents into prostitution at age 14 in a corrupt modern version of the ancient Hindu cult dedicated to the goddess Yellamma. A foreword by Nobelist Amartya Sen and an introduction by Bill and Melinda Gates both argue that we must cease stigmatizing and blaming hapless victims if we are to find real solutions. Among the few bright spots here is the fact that some of the infected protagonists have gone to work for NGOs and now counsel their peers.
A cautionary volume that stresses the need to educate, treat and create jobs.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-307-45472-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Anchor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2008
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
