A timely read, particularly for inside-the-Beltway types who, one hopes, are paying attention.
What, us worry about WMDs? USA Today senior diplomatic correspondent Slavin assures that the worries are overwrought: “For all its incendiary rhetoric, Iran is the Rodney Dangerfield of Middle Eastern nations.”
That means, of course, that Iran gets no respect, or so its leaders believe, and striving for that respect and recognition can force a nation into moral, ethical and political compromises. An especially curious one, says Slavin, is Iran’s development of nuclear capability: “Iranians hoping for reconciliation with the United States saw diplomatic promise in their nuclear progress.” Huh? According to a Tehran editorialist, some semblance of parity would mean that the United States would take the Iranian government seriously, even though most of the editorialist’s compatriots were more concerned with improving the economy than spending money on a nuclear deterrent. Indeed, says one Iranian foreign-policy expert, “If we had 100 billion euros of European investment in Iran . . . Iran would never even think to divert nuclear enrichment because the damage would be huge for Iran.” Slavin allows that the mullahs and ayatollahs and reactionaries within Iran are implacably anti-American, which may make rapprochement seem unlikely. But, she adds, ordinary people and a growing number of political types have a friendly attitude toward Americans, in part because of their “links to a diaspora of nearly a million people in the United States”—to say nothing of “little regard for Arabs.” So what is to be done? The author encourages diplomacy and patience, noting that there are political divisions in play in Iran that may yield an opening should the “executives of construction” or the “Islamic Participation Front” come to power in place of the current “neoconservative” Ahmadinejad regime. The alternative would be terrible for both countries, she concludes. As one Iranian woman-on-the-street tells Slavin in an interview, “We don’t want anything bad to happen. Pray for us. We always pray for you.”
A timely read, particularly for inside-the-Beltway types who, one hopes, are paying attention.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-312-36825-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2007
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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