by Alexander Thurston ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 1, 2017
Though the author sets aside “Boko Haram’s treatment of women” due to “reasons of space,” he offers a highly useful, timely,...
A diagnostic study of the ultraconservative “mobile jihadist gang” from Nigeria that has taken a violent toll on government and civilians alike.
In 2014, the kidnapping of 276 schoolgirls from the Nigerian town of Chibok brought worldwide attention to this terrorist group whose name derives in Hausa-Arabic from “Western-style education” (boko) and “forbidden” (haram). Thurston (Salafism in Nigeria: Islam, Preaching, and Politics, 2016) systematically examines the movement’s origins as a religious study group in 2002 in the Nigerian city of Maiduguri, led by the charismatic preacher Muhammad Yusuf, through subsequent chronological phases: a decisive turn to violence by 2009, uprising (and death of Yusuf) followed by government suppression, and re-emergence in 2010 as a terrorist group linked to al-Qaida. In the first chapter, “The Lifeworld of Muhammad Yusuf,” the author provides a solid overview of the fluctuating society in northeastern Nigeria from the 1970s, when Yusuf was born and the north of the country lagged in development compared to the south, through the 1990s, when disruptive urbanization and globalization pushed people into migration, poverty, and illiteracy. Western schools, a remnant of British colonialism—Nigeria became independent in 1960—were seen as highly suspect places. As Thurston writes, “Western-educated politicians and technocrats have presided over a system that has stolen much of Nigeria’s wealth, leaving much of the population poor.” With Christian-Muslim tensions rising, ultraconservative Salafi teachings became more popular. The author delves deeply into what Yusuf was actually teaching: a core doctrine of religious exclusivism that clearly demonized anyone thinking otherwise, with a focus on the Quranic slogan, “Chaos is worse than killing.” Thurston also weighs the mostly ineffectual government responses and urges a “long-term, fine-grained approach to understanding the Boko Haram crisis.” This book is a good starting point.
Though the author sets aside “Boko Haram’s treatment of women” due to “reasons of space,” he offers a highly useful, timely, illuminating work about a little-understood terrorist group.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-691-17224-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
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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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