A chilling account of reporters in danger that heightens awareness of the importance of a free press.
A journalist’s memoir of training reporters during a dangerous time in Rwanda.
Sundaram (Stringer: A Reporter’s Journey in the Congo, 2014), who previously received a Reuters journalism award for his reporting from Congo, “had come to Rwanda to teach journalists how to identify, research and write news stories.” The program, funded by the United Kingdom and the European Union and approved by the Rwandan government, was mandated to report “mostly on government initiatives.” Under the leadership of President Paul Kagame, the country had been praised for its progress since the 1994 genocide, but Sundaram was learning from his students the perils of veering from the “official” good news. He heard stories of journalists who were harassed, beaten, or thrown into jail after criticizing the government or merely reporting existing problems such as poverty. The country’s popular independent newspaper, Umuseso, was shut down. Another editor/reporter was hounded and on the run after he started a magazine with a story about malnutrition. With unfettered power came absurdities. The government ordered villages to tear off their thatched roofs because they were primitive. A local pastor was arrested after telling villagers to “stop destroying their huts until the government built them replacements.” While people were getting sick from living outside, flowers became “obligatory in the workplace.” In spots, the book reads like a thriller, but the writing, more descriptive than crisp, doesn't sustain the tautness. Sundaram’s talents show in his creation of an atmosphere of paranoia and dread. In this setting, the author began to wonder whom he could trust. An appendix provides a listing of reporters who were fired from their jobs, forced to leave the country, beaten, jailed, or killed. In this climate, it became nearly impossible to find journalists for his program, which eventually shut down.
A chilling account of reporters in danger that heightens awareness of the importance of a free press.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-385-53956-2
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
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
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.
