A well-researched and engrossing analysis of 21st-century human crises.
A debut nonfiction book surveys the paradoxical role of religion in both fostering and hampering global peace.
Trained as a pilot at Pakistan’s air force academy, Saeed dedicates this work to two secondary teachers “who helped me understand the spirit of my religion” and to a flight instructor who taught him that aviation checklists were “not meant to be followed blindly, but rather with conscious discernment and thoughtful judgment.” Reflecting on a lifetime of experience from his South Asian upbringing, his education at the University of Michigan (where he was elected president of the student government), and his multidecade career as a global businessman, the author is more than aware that religion often exacerbates the “unprecedented existential challenges” humanity confronts today. Nearly half of all Americans, for example, view Islamic extremists and White supremacist Christian nationalists as threats. Alternately, the book suggests, religion’s “innate power to heal” means that it is vital to long-term solutions. Drawing on the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s call for a “radical revolution of values,” the volume echoes the Christian leader’s warning against “the evil triplets” of racism, militarism, and extreme materialism. Central to the author’s thesis is that from the global to the individual level, religions and their institutions are intertwined with war, terrorism, and systemic corruption. With a firm command of global religions—from the three major Abrahamic faiths, Hinduism, and Buddhism to Indigenous African and Native American traditions—Saeed breaks down theological barriers by emphasizing common elements that lie at the core of human spiritual expression. Impressively researched with 80 pages of bibliographic entries and endnotes, the book employs an interdisciplinary approach that includes a sophisticated analysis of geopolitics and philosophy, in particular the ways in which Thomas Hobbes’ theory of “war of everyone against everyone” drives today’s societal structures. At 407 pages, the volume, with its detailed analysis of myriad issues from multiple religious, geopolitical, and philosophical perspectives, makes for a sometimes dense read. This meticulousness is balanced by an accessible text that deftly incorporates sacred verses from world religions and is accompanied by a multipage glossary of key terms.
A well-researched and engrossing analysis of 21st-century human crises.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2022
ISBN: 9781611535013
Page Count: 407
Publisher: Torchflame Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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