Still, there’s plenty to ponder here in the matter of how youngsters reconcile devoutness and the sowing of wild oats.
BBC producer Stratton looks at demographic and cultural trends in the Arab world, and by her account things are just going to get stranger.
Throughout the Middle East, writes the author, are legions of young unemployed men who pass the day, it seems, kicking pebbles around in the dirt. Called hayateen, “men who lean against walls,” they have little else to do. Given that there are a quarter-billion young Arabs, and given that major civil unrest seems always to accompany a large number of young people in any given society (think of the ’60s), and given that American policymakers seem not to have studied this demographic fact before invading Iraq—well, the future looks bright for anyone who knows how to wire an IED. Meanwhile, young Arab women are increasingly fashion-conscious and media-savvy, even as they retain most of the traditional pieties. By Stratton’s account, these shining youth haunt the tonier nightclubs of Beirut and Cairo, listen to underground rock bands in Damascus, work in advertising and television and spend a lot of time discussing how to accessorize with a veil, since veiling, as one young woman tells her, “is now—how you say?—trendy.” Many of these young people have no conceptual difficulty voting for or otherwise supporting fundamentalist groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan or Hezbollah in Lebanon—one says to Stratton, “I mean, the thing is, really, maybe it is religion that’s going to save this region.” He does not elaborate what the region is to be saved from, and Stratton doesn’t really press the point. While her report is eye-catching, it has the depth of a TV spot. There’s lots of colorful description here, but not much analysis, making this good background for someone inclined to think a little more pointedly about what these trends mean for the rest of the world.
Still, there’s plenty to ponder here in the matter of how youngsters reconcile devoutness and the sowing of wild oats.Pub Date: July 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-933633-50-3
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2008
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
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
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