A Camus for our time, Maalouf urges that civilization is “fragile, shimmering, evanescent”—and perhaps doomed.
The Lebanese-born French author offers a pensive, lyrical meditation on a dying world.
The author of brilliant novels and books of essays such as Disordered World, Maalouf announces his theme at the outset: “I was born hale and healthy into the arms of a dying civilization, and I have spent my whole life feeling that I am surviving, with no credit or blame, when around me so many things were falling into ruin.” At first, he means the vanished civilization of the Levant, where Christians, Jews, and Arabs once lived together but that has since collapsed in ethnocidal battles and sectarian wars. “The Levantine ideal,” writes Maalouf, “as my people experienced it, as I have always wanted to live it, demands that each person assume full responsibility for his own, and a little responsibility for others.” No more. Born in Beirut in 1949, a Maronite Christian, Maalouf lived in the Egypt of Gamal Abdel Nasser, “the last colossus of the Arab world,” who ultimately failed in his mission to unite it; in adulthood, Maalouf moved to Paris, where he has lived for decades. Egypt, he writes, “was doomed to crumble,” while Lebanon’s ecumenicalism gave way to narrow self-interest and appeals to outsiders of one’s own ethnicity for support—Arabs calling for Arabs and Jews for Jews, which Maalouf likens to various Swiss cantons calling on their German, French, and Italian neighbors for intercession, which would spell doom for the Swiss Confederation. The analogy is apposite, for the rest of the world is also suffering collapse. “In the era in which we live,” writes the author, “despair can sweep across oceans, scale walls, cross any frontier, physical or mental, and it is not easily contained.” Ideals of democracy, citizenship, environmental health, world peace, and the like now fall before nationalism, authoritarianism, and the decline of private life in the Orwellian present.
A Camus for our time, Maalouf urges that civilization is “fragile, shimmering, evanescent”—and perhaps doomed.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64286-075-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: World Editions
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
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
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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