A Kashmiri journalist examines a new generation of tyrants threatening the (illusory) promises of liberal democracy.
Columbia University–trained, New Delhi–based journalist Peer (Curfewed Night: One Kashmiri Journalist’s Frontline Account of Life, Love, and War in His Homeland, 2010) focuses on alarming authoritarian developments in India under Narendra Modi, chief of the right-wing nationalist BJP party and prime minister since 2014, and in Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdo?an, the head of the AKP party, which has been in power since 2002. In both cases, the author traces their respective paths to power, political promises and deceptions, and oppositions. In Modi’s case, the Gujarat-based politician was anointed successor to Lal Krishna Advani, a leading Hindu nationalist politician, and thus owes “a debt that would see a massive payoff.” The horrendous violence of early 2002 in Godhra between Hindu activists and Muslim tea vendors, resulting in roughly 1,000 mostly Muslim deaths, was largely blamed on Modi’s complicity and political patronage, and the event has continued to haunt his leadership. Modi’s promises for economic order and better infrastructure seem to have canceled out concerns about sectarian violence. Yet Modi’s xenophobia and intimidation of intellectuals and activists, such as Rohith Vemula and Kashmiri rebel Burhan Wani, underscore a dark aspect to his populist regime. In Turkey, Erdo?an’s embrace of the European Union, emphasis on infrastructure, ostensible democratic reforms, and marriage of “moderate Islam and market-friendly policies” obscure his authoritarian tendencies, including corruption, harsh crackdowns on any opposition, and the suppression of non-Turkish minorities like the Kurds. Peer examines how Erdo?an’s relationship with one-time ally Fethullah Gülen, a Muslim preacher with powerful followers, degenerated into mutual hostility. The flood of refugees into Turkey has only exacerbated the prime minister’s strongman proclivities.
A knowledgeable journalist astutely delineates a troubling global move toward the right wing.Pub Date: March 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9971264-2-6
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Columbia Global Reports
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | GENERAL CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | WORLD | HISTORY
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BOOK REVIEW
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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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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. 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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