Excellent reportage that is of critical importance in understanding contemporary Chinese politics.
Australian lawyer and journalist Dapiran, a longtime resident of Hong Kong, gives a commanding firsthand account of the recent—and ongoing—protests there.
The author opens by first noting how freely Hong Kong police were in deploying tear gas to counter the seemingly unending chain of demonstrations that enveloped Hong Kong in 2019—in November, at a rate “approaching two rounds for every single minute of the day”—and how bravely the demonstrators fought back. As with the Tiananmen Square demonstrations of 1989, the protests were touched off by a seemingly minor event, the question of whether an accused murderer sheltering in Hong Kong should be extradited to Taiwan, where he had committed his crime. That event gave rise to a broad-based discussion of whether the government in Beijing would observe the jealously guarded rights of the former British colony. “The year 2019 may be remembered as the year that defined post-handover Hong Kong; China’s answer to that question will determine whether 2019 will also be remembered as the last year of Hong Kong as it once was,” Dapiran writes. Beijing talks a good game of honoring those rights while taking an active role in trying to sway elections and inserting undercover soldiers and police on the streets, all the while attempting to avoid a Tiananmen-like crackdown at the cost of its international high standing. Dapiran argues that the 2019 protests were the continuation of the earlier “Umbrella Movement” of 2014. By implication, the author, who breathed in plenty of tear gas himself while monitoring them, suggests that the protests are likely to begin anew until Beijing honors the terms of the “One Country, Two Systems” model with which it has been trying to woo Taiwan to reunify—and he would seem to endorse the protestors’ claim that they “were freedom fighters not only for their own city, but for the world.”
Excellent reportage that is of critical importance in understanding contemporary Chinese politics.Pub Date: June 23, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-950354-27-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Scribe
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
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