by Barbie Latza Nadeau ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 13, 2018
Though sometimes a chore to read, Nadeau’s book makes for a useful work of advocacy, calling attention to a terrible traffic...
Journalistic account of the sex trade that runs from the west coast of Africa to the southern coast of Italy and beyond.
American journalist Nadeau, author of an earlier account of the Italian trial of American murder suspect Amanda Knox (Angel Face, 2010), turns her attention to the Camorra, or Calabrian Mafia, and their engagements with the drug and arms trades, which in turn net them human cargo: young women from Nigeria and other African countries, recruited at home and promised livelihoods in Europe, then smuggled into Italy on overcrowded, easily shipwrecked boats. Reports Nadeau, “in 2016, eleven thousand Nigerian women and girls arrived in Italy on those boats.” There they were collected and put to work in the mob-controlled prostitution industry, with no way out. It does not help that Nigerian women can claim asylum easily by saying that they are threatened by Boko Haram, nor that the immigration authorities “may even know that [a woman] is being trafficked and forced to sell sex against her will, but they still look away.” Church-based and other nongovernmental agencies have stepped in but have been overwhelmed so that few women are intercepted as they land and can be guided into applying for safe asylum away from Camorra control. “They have to work fast,” writes the author, “because the traffickers are waiting in the refugee camps to ferry the girls to their madams, often within the first week of their arrival.” The book, built on interviews with many participants, is well-reported and consistently heartbreaking yet occasionally repetitive. Moreover, the author drops threads only to pick them up later, slowed by too much attention to minor detail (“Some men stop on motorcycles. The teenage boys who stop are invariably riding mopeds”).
Though sometimes a chore to read, Nadeau’s book makes for a useful work of advocacy, calling attention to a terrible traffic in human misery.Pub Date: March 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-78607-255-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
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by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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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by Abhijit V. Banerjee & Esther Duflo ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 12, 2019
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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