Lim is a single-minded and enthusiastic advocate for the common and public ownership of land.
A journalistic account of the impact of private land ownership on the environment and on people’s quality of life.
“America is synonymous with private property,” writes Lim, a Brooklyn-based freelance writer. And, she states more boldly, “the commodification of land is driving many of America’s most intransigent problems.” Historically, Native Americans were dispossessed by European settlers and, later, by the federal government, and former enslaved people were promised and then denied land reparations, condemning them to sharecropping servitude. Today, developers purchase land in low-income and working-class neighborhoods and erect luxury buildings, fueling gentrification and its accompanying high rents and shrinking supply of affordable housing. Lim asserts that the public will be served and the environment protected only when land is publicly owned, such that governments are accountable, or placed in community land trusts. She builds her case on evidence from events in the country’s history and stories of grassroots organizations such as the Indian Creek Community Forest in Oregon; the Somali Bantu Community Association (concerned with farmland security) in Lewiston, Maine; the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative in Roxbury, Massachusetts; and the Northern Farmers of Color Land Trust in Minnesota. Lim’s reports from her journalistic travels through the U.S. and Canada are woven with stories of growing up in Calgary, her family history, and her current life in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. The accounts she presents, though, belie her claim “that land is rarely talked about as a social or economic issue today.” And her assumption that many of America’s intransigent problems are attributable to land ownership and to how the country’s opportunities and resources are distributed would have been more credible if tempered by discussion of their entanglement in matters of race, class, and political ideology.
Lim is a single-minded and enthusiastic advocate for the common and public ownership of land.Pub Date: June 25, 2024
ISBN: 9781250275189
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
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
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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