A highly absorbing chronicle of a transcendent journey.
A reporter reveals the cultural, economic, and spiritual forces affecting a Senegalese fishing community.
For nearly 20 years, journalist Badkhen (Walking with Abel: Journeys with the Nomads of the African Savannah, 2015, etc.) has reported on daily life in Africa and the Middle East in six books of nonfiction and articles in venues such as the New York Times and the New Republic. But she had never focused on a population utterly dependent on the ocean. “How,” she asks, “does the shifting demarcation line between earth and sea define the way we see the world, shape our community and communality”? For a season, she lived and worked in the West African port of Joal, Senegal, joining in the “primordial sloshing” aboard handcrafted boats that, day and night, in calm or storm, set out into the depths of the Atlantic Ocean for fish. During night fishing, she sailed for 20 hours at a time; on land, she writes, “I dream I am growing gills.” Fishing as livelihood, she quickly discovers, is becoming increasingly imperiled by industrial vessels and climate change, reducing the catch to a tenth of what it had been 10 years earlier. “To live off the sea,” she realizes, “is to submit to its vagaries, to endure constantly the tension between desire and defeat.” Fishermen “rely on miracles for a living,” sought through sacrifice and prayer to God and to the ocean, “whose waters carry their fortunes and their sorrows and their dead.” For Badkhen, those roiling waters exerted a primordial power: “The ocean bewitches,” she writes, “reveals the ancient predator in me.” The community bewitched her, as well, and her affection was reciprocated: village children called her Auntie; her name was painted on a ship’s bow, as mascot. The author’s prose is lyrical, precise, and lucent, whether she is portraying fishermen and their families or the sea at night. “Luminescence weeps into the boat through seams in blinking rivulets,” she writes. “You bail buckets of radiances. The outboard motor churns pure light.”
A highly absorbing chronicle of a transcendent journey.Pub Date: March 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-59463-486-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Nov. 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2017
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
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
SEEN & HEARD
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