A courageous and well-informed piece of journalism.
The Paris correspondent for a leading Brazilian newspaper recounts his experience covering the Libyan revolution.
During the eight-month conflict that deposed Muammar Gaddafi (1942-2011), 32 journalists were imprisoned, 15 kidnapped, 30 expelled and 11 killed. Measured against these sobering statistics, Netto counts his own eight-day imprisonment as trifling. Still, the pages devoted to his isolation in one of Gaddafi’s jail cells powerfully convey the desperate uncertainties engendered by a lawless regime under which the whim of the dictator controlled the country for more than 40 years. Trying to follow up conflicting reports coming out of Libya about a possible rebellion and after numerous frustrated attempts to cross the Tunisian border, Netto entered the country illegally. Betrayed by one of his rebel escorts, he ended up in the hands of loyalists torn between their contempt for journalists and their need to appear unflustered by the revolt. Once released and deported, Netto made it back to Libya months later, in time to report on the fall of Tripoli and the capture and killing of Gaddafi, “the Osama bin Laden of the 1980s.” Given the sudden and frightening interruption of his mission, it’s not surprising that those portions of his narrative recounting the various international responses to the Libyan crisis, crucial as they proved for the insurgency’s eventual success, lack the punch of his on-the-scene reporting. Nevertheless, whenever and wherever he’s on the ground in Libya, Netto delivers some first-rate reporting, including interviews of various rebel fighters and eyewitness accounts of horrific scenes no doubt the result of rebel-committed war crimes. He also manages to expose another of the Gaddafi regime’s many lies: He confirms that Hana, the tyrant’s daughter, long thought killed by a 1986 Reagan-ordered air strike, has been alive and working as a doctor and hospital administrator all this time. Notwithstanding the current political chaos in Libya, Netto concludes with some hopeful words about the country’s future.
A courageous and well-informed piece of journalism.Pub Date: June 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-137-27912-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
