by Andrei Netto translated by Michael Marsden ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 3, 2014
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
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by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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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by Abhijit V. Banerjee & Esther Duflo ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 12, 2019
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
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