A timely, politically charged biography of Bishop Carlos X. Belo, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1996 for his efforts to end the oppression of the people of East Timor at the hands of the Indonesian military. Kohen, a former investigative reporter with NBC News, canonizes Belo for his struggle to minimize the human impact of the Indonesian invasion of East Timor, but his saintly portrait of a great humanitarian rising to the call of the suffering masses seems less intriguing than his extremely acute political analysis of the ongoing crisis. Of particular interest is the involvement of the US throughout the 28-year history of the conflict. From Kissinger’s nod to the Suharto government when he declared that the US “understands Indonesia’s position,” on the eve of the invasion in 1975, to the deployment of American-made OV-10 Bronco counterguerrilla planes during the “70s, to the millions of dollars of questionable campaign contributions received by the Clinton administration, the Indonesian invasion has been facilitated by the US government. Not until the Santa Cruz cemetery massacre of 1991, captured live by the international media (more than 250 youngsters gunned down by Indonesian troops), did any serious international attention focus on the occupation. Noam Chomsky and others have written extensively about the failure of the Western media to cover human-rights violations in East Timor, and Kohen’s graphic description of youthful protestors being shot down with American-made M-16 rifles renders the reasons for such a news blackout quite clear’stories about “emerging markets” trump those about human-rights violations every time. The collapse of the Indonesian economy and the end of Suharto’s dictatorship have made that country increasingly dependent on the West. Kohen issues an important call for members of the financial First World to take advantage of their influence by bringing pressure on the Indonesian government to end its brutal policies in East Timor.
Pub Date: June 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-312-19885-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1999
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
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