A hard sell for nonacademic readers but an elucidating journey for scholars.
A scholarly, depressing portrait of a country whose allegiance to Islam has not been able to hold it together nor prevent its being convulsed by cycles of violence.
Pakistani-American historian Jalal (History/Tufts Univ.; The Pity of Partition: Manto's Life, Times, and Work across the India-Pakistan Divide, 2013, etc.) offers a comprehensive history of Pakistan since its inception in 1947, with an eye toward its defining post-colonial element: military rule. Envisioned by its founder, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, as an arrangement of equitable power sharing between the Muslim provinces and Hindustan (as he called India), Pakistan nonetheless emerged with the dismembered provinces Punjab and Bengal a “truncated…moth-eaten and mutilated state” that was expected to collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. While created as a Muslim homeland, Pakistan left 40 million “to their own devices in mainly Hindu India.” Adding to the imminent instability was the new nation’s push to adopt Urdu as its official language, when nearly 25 percent of the population of East Pakistan was Hindu and used other predominant languages like Pashtun. Jinnah’s early death in 1948 left an unfortunate leadership vacuum and a perpetual internal debate over Pakistan’s national identity. Jalal delineates painstakingly how, in the decades that followed, Pakistan, unlike India, was unable to build institutions of participatory democracy and instead moved toward a centralization of power “under the auspices” of military and bureaucracy. Alliance with the United States is not the sole reason for its militarism, argues Jalal, but it was fed by paranoia of India’s dominance over Kashmir and the need to build its defense forces. Tracing key events—the initial imposition of martial law by President Iskander Mirza in 1958, the 1971 civil war that created Bangladesh, the rise and fall of populist leader Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and one assassination after the other—Jalal brings us to the present day, where Pakistan, despite being called a failing or failed state, continues to hope for change.
A hard sell for nonacademic readers but an elucidating journey for scholars.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-674-05289-5
Page Count: 420
Publisher: Belknap/Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
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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