In a dizzying scenario of violence, Soufan provides clarity and balance.
Tracing the hydra-headed reach of al-Qaida and how its leadership morphed into the Islamic Caliphate of Iraq and elsewhere.
Former FBI agent Soufan (The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda, 2011) composes a concise, accessible, enormously readable account of the trajectory of al-Qaida, especially through the actions of its murderous main protagonists. To tell the story of this splintering terrorist operation, Soufan—as others have had to do before him—first steps backward to delineate the state of the Islamic world in which these jihadis could take root: scant education for most Muslims, based on dogma and ritual and little critical thinking; oppression of women; unemployment and blunted economic opportunity; and insularity and ignorance about the outside world. In such conditions, radicalism was attractive, and Osama bin Laden, having “crystallized his legend by helping the mujahideen [sic] win a famous victory against Russian special forces in the mountain passes of Jaji near the Pakistani border,” stepped in after the Russian withdrawal and urged the Arab recruits to fight “the imperialists.” He believed it was necessary to concentrate the movement’s ire on defeating the Americans first, the far enemy—hence the spectacular success, by al-Qaida’s accounting, of 9/11. Bin Laden’s nemesis in building up the Iraqi jihad, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was killed by the Americans in 2006, would take up the struggle against the apostate Shia especially, to great controversy within the organization: “waging jihad with my brothers to establish for Islam a homeland and for the Koran a state.” After bin Laden’s death in 2011 and the rise of the Arab Spring, the main organization splintered, in Somalia, Yemen, Algeria, and elsewhere, with Egyptian surgeon Ayman al-Zawahiri becoming ringmaster. As the al-Qaida franchises proliferated, the goal—the establishment of an Islamic state, made possible more quickly than imagined by the Syrian civil war—was shared and spread, and, as the author notes, the organization “once again has the means and the opportunity to attack.”
In a dizzying scenario of violence, Soufan provides clarity and balance.Pub Date: May 2, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-393-24117-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
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
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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