A well-written primer on the Iranian protests responding to the death of Mahsa Amini in 2022.
An international team of authors provide analysis of Iran’s 2022–2023 protest movement in this anthology of essays.
“Dedicated to those who sacrificed for a free and democratic future for the Iranian people,”[vi] this book assembles an impressive panel of diplomats and scholars who offer insights into the Iranian protest movement that followed the 2022 murder of 23-year-old Mahsa Amini while she was in jail for not wearing a hijab “properly.” Many of the chapters center on the role of women, who “have been at the forefront of the struggle for democracy in their country,” per contributor Ingrid Betancourt, a former Colombian senator. Published by the International Committee in Search of Justice, a Brussels-based lobby that opposes Iran’s Islamic Republic, many of the book’s contributors are former diplomats or politicians who favor a more robust Western response to Iran, including ISJ’s president Alejo Vidal Quadras (former vice president of the European Parliament), J. Kenneth Blackwell (former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights), and Robert Torricelli (a former U.S. senator from New Jersey). These views are supplemented by more scholarly perspectives offered by university professors Behrouz Pouyan and Ivan Sascha Sheehan. While each author’s chapter focuses on a specific aspect of the protest movement (from the Islamic Republic’s repressive strategies to the tactics and unified spirit of activists), all emphasize the bravery of the revolutionary movement’s participants against a brutal regime. The book also calls for a more active response from the international community that goes “beyond expressing statements of condemnation of the regime” or merely denoting “sympathy with the Iranian people,” but that also includes concrete action, such as the closing of Iranian embassies throughout Europe. At less than 80 pages, this is a solid introduction to the contemporary protest movement in Iran that packs in-depth analysis and contextualization of a complex nation into a concise work. Though political, its analysis rarely comes across as propagandistic, instead presenting nuanced commentary that effectively makes the case that “the world will be a better place when Iran is free.”
A well-written primer on the Iranian protests responding to the death of Mahsa Amini in 2022.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2023
ISBN: 978-9464752205
Page Count: 90
Publisher: International Committee in Search of Justice
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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