A knowledgeable journalist astutely delineates a troubling global move toward the right wing.
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. 15, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
A heartfelt if somewhat unsurprising view of old age by the former president. Carter (Living Faith, 1996, etc.) succinctly evaluates the evolution and current status of federal policies concerning the elderly (including a balanced appraisal of the difficulties facing the Social Security system). He also meditates, while drawing heavily on autobiographical anecdotes, on the possibilities for exploration and intellectual and spiritual growth in old age. There are few lightning bolts to dazzle in his prescriptions (cultivate family ties; pursue the restorative pleasures of hobbies and socially minded activities). Yet the warmth and frankness of Carter’s remarks prove disarming. Given its brevity, the work is more of a call to senior citizens to reconsider how best to live life than it is a guide to any of the details involved.
Pub Date: Oct. 26, 1998
ISBN: 0-345-42592-8
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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