Pargeter’s cliché-ridden prose detracts from, but does not completely overwhelm, her account of the brutal Qadaffi regime.
A thorough but wooden examination of the making of Muammar Qaddafi.
Unlike Lindsey Hilsum in her on-the-ground journalistic account, Sandstorm (2012), Pargeter (The Muslim Brotherhood, 2010, etc.) maintains an academic distance with her workmanlike prose. The author takes a more historical approach, portraying the coup by the young Bedouin soldier in 1969 as the last in an unhappy series of power grabs over the sparsely populated, disunited, tribe-riddled Libya. Under the imperious Italians, the Libyans were treated merely as “shadows in their own land”; the country achieved independence in December 1951 only by the maneuverings of the victorious powers of World War II. “At the time of independence,” writes the author, “Libya was ranked the poorest nation in the world.” When the group of fervently nationalist officers finally seized power from the ineffectual King Idris in 1969, Qaddafi took the lead, insisting on a purity of purpose—despite the fact that he had no worldly experience or education to speak of, shocking other Arab leaders with his fulsome political naivety. What Pargeter calls the “shambolic atmosphere” around him grew to nightmarish proportions once Libya struck oil. It resulted in a bloated public sector, bureaucratic chaos based on his “hopelessly simplistic” utopian Green Book (which Pargeter has actually read and helpfully dissects), the formation of “curious alliances” (e.g., with terrorist organizations and the worst dictators of Africa once the Arab League shunned him), rampant nepotism, a whimsical Islamist doctrine, and the elimination of opposition parties, among other dictatorial prerogatives. Ultimately, readers will wonder why the populace waited so long to get rid of him.
Pargeter’s cliché-ridden prose detracts from, but does not completely overwhelm, her account of the brutal Qadaffi regime.Pub Date: July 31, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-300-13932-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2012
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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
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